I’m sure you could name several people right off the top of your head that constantly complain about gas prices. You may even admit being that person as well. I’ll proudly proclaim that I’m one of them as well. But what cab we really do about? Oh sure, we’ve all seen those e-mails about taking a particular day and no one buy gas that day, or specifically, from a particular station.

Then of course there’s gas from the stations owned by the president of Argentina, who really hates the United States and our President. We’ve seen and heard Chavez and his opinions… Oh boy…

So recently, the legislature in New York has a bill that they are trying to pass a proposal which will suspend the New York State gas tax from Memorial Day until Labor Day. The savings at the pump would be 32 cents per gallon. The loss in state revenue is estimated at $520 million.

The opponents to the proposal have this to say:

Past Assembly Majority Leader Sheldon Silver (D-Albany)

“I do not support the proposal to lift state taxes on gasoline for the summer months,” stated Silver. “The Bush administration has refused to take any action to rein in huge oil company profits, and the [Bush] administration has failed to put in place an effective energy policy that puts consumers first and moves our country toward energy independence.”

Silver maintains that any tax savings would never reach consumers. Instead, he said, he believes that local businesses involved in fuel distribution or retailing oil “will simply raise their prices to eliminate any cost savings for the public.”

Marc Alessi (D-Wading River)

“If you don’t go after windfall profits, they’ll just raise the prices to where they are again,” agreed Marc Alessi (D-Wading River). “It’s a political shell game to pretend that a tax holiday is going to fix the problem.”

The supporters have this to say:

According to NYS Senator John Flanagan (R-Smithtown), a sponsor of the Senate version of the plan, suspending the state tax on gas would have a number of benefits, including providing an incentive for out-of-state visitors to come to New York. It would lower operating costs for area businesses, he added. While the loss of revenue to the state could amount to as much as $520 million over the summer, he said the benefits would help offset the cost to the state of providing relief at the pump through a gas tax holiday.

It appears the battle will continue on this topic at least until the end of June which is when the assembly recesses for the summer. So whether it passes or not they can keep it stalled and those in favor will look like the good guys to the voters. Those opposed of course would be the bad guys, but everyone will forget about this before the next election anyway.

To be honest, this is just an attempt to put a tiny band-aid on a gaping wound. Take a look at this graph from zfacts.com:

As you can see, and obviously know without even looking at the graph, that since 9/11 gas has continued to rise with no end in site.

We are concentrating all of our national efforts on the war on terrorism because of 9/11. I’m all for retribution, although some would say that’s what those responsible for 9/11 were trying to accomplish as well… But here’s the real, current act of terrorism in the U.S. 9/11 seeded the start of crumbling our economy. Of course the housing market issues have played a large part and to be honest I haven’t thought that hard on the subject to see if there is a correlation or not there. But here’s the thing.

Many lives were lost and emotionally damaged when the towers fell. But the residual aftershocks are still being felt. Everyone in the U.S. is affected by gas prices. Whether you drive or not, whether you use a hybrid, or are a true believer in peddle power, you are affected.

The price of gas affects everything from the clothes you where to the food you purchase at the grocery store. Everything we purchase is more expensive because of the cost of transporting these goods. (Gas prices).

There are many to blame for the prices of gas, the disgusting profits that the oil companies are raking in is truly just that… disgusting. But as the chart shows, the huge spike was when the U.S. invaded Iraq. I won’t go non about war issues, that’s another blog altogether, but here’s something…

During the first Gulf War in the 90’s when President Bush Sr. set that liberation in motion, he also froze the gas prices. Froze the gas prices? Really? Can he do that? He did… I’ll report why later, but why didn’t President Bush Jr. do the same? Was it an oversight? I doubt it. He has a lot of smart people around him including his father. I’m sure it came up…  Why not freeze them?

So why are we paying through the nose for gas and goods that have to be priced higher for their delivery? Oil isn’t that scarce… yet. It’ll happen eventually, but for now there is still plenty.

Who’s to blame for this plight?

I’ve been a reader for as long as I can remember. It’s one of the many things that my late father instilled in me and I’m thinkful for that.

i’ve been a Dean Koontz fan for quite a long time. I get e-mails from his website every so often when a new book is coming out. I received another one today, and found that one series of his book has turned into webisodes for the latest book Odd Hours. I was pretty pleased, as this series has been a pretty good read.

Anyway, I thought I’d share these out here in a few posts. It’s not necessary for you to have read the books to understand and enjoy the webisodes. I hope you enjoy these as well.

There are 4 in all. I’ll post each one after the other.

Take a 15 minute break from your day and enjoy the webisodes…

Dean Koontz’s “Odd Passenger” Webisode 1

Dean Koontz’s “Odd Passenger” Webisode 2

Dean Koontz’s “Odd Passenger” Webisode 3

Dean Koontz’s “Odd Passenger” Webisode 4

More and more, I’ve noticed that the television shows are utilizing the web. About a year or so ago they finally started placing their popular shows available for watching over the web. The streaming quality is pretty good. No complaints really, other than the embedded commercials that you are not able to skip. But I suppose for those without Tivo and for the convenience of watching your favorite show while you “work”, it’s a small price to pay…

Last night I was watching How I met your mother. For those of you unfamiliar, it’s essential Friends 2.0. It is quite funny and Neil Patrick Harris is Hilarious! Anyway, last night the married couple were in financial trouble and the wife had to sell her extensive wardrobe to help pay for renovations to their apartment.

Her husband set up a website, www.lilyandmarshallselltheirstuff.com. This was to sell her clothes. At the end of the show, they promoted the site for things sold from the show to go to charity. A great cause and a smart method for shows to promote their charities.

Going through Google Trends, I found that the search for their site was in the number 1 and 2 spot. They must be doing something right…

As for Google trends, I really like it. It has some useful information that can be utilized in many ways.

Happy blogging!

We have been finishing up our kitchen for a while now.  We tore out the cruddy looking floor from the past owner and laid in new tile.  That was quite the undertaking, but with the assistance of my father-in-law we conquered that task.

We then painted the cabinets and installed a custom countertop.

We are now working on installing the tiled backsplash.  We chose a nice 2″ travertine with a 2″ herringbone  divider design.  The travertine was in 12″ sheets with a mesh behind it.  We were thinking this would be a very fast install…  Not so much…

Trying to trim out for all of the outlets proved to be very time consuming.  Our main problem came from the tiles wanting to slide right off the wall.  We initially thought this was a problem with the thin set mixture.  We adjusted this and found it to be a little better but still troublesome.  We were finally able to work out a system that made the progress move along more quickly.  Since we were essentially installing three sheets above one another, we figured starting from the bottom was the best bet and let the rest set while we continued around the counter.

This solved that problem and we are in the process of the top row now.

I’ll be posting pictures for those interested in the progress soon.  It’s time for me to get back to working on the wall.

Have a great day!

I’m a pretty big fan of such shows as Medium and Ghost Whisperer.  I enjoyed the movie Ghost and the Sixth Sense as well.  Blair Witch project was kind of spooky if not nauseating from the camera movement causing motion sickness…  So, in the theme of these popular shows and movies, I had a peculiar encounter last night.  With you, I will share…

It was around 7:00.  I had the two youngest kids, 4 and almost 2, in the bathtub cleaning up after a rather messy dinner/art project.  (Liam was covered in tomato sauce from head to toe…)

I called down the stairs to Holly asking for batteries from one of the kids bath toys. (A cool little squid like thing that swims through the water with a torpedo like screw on the end.)

At the top of the stairs we have a pocket door that leads into the guest bedroom / office / junk room.  Other’s have a junk drawer in the kitchen, we have a junk room in our upstairs that catches all things we have no idea where to store at a moments notice…

The pocket door was closed which I had closed earlier in the day to ensure the youngest child did not wander in and get lost for half the day.

I heard music coming from inside the room.  I slid open the door and found the television on.  I thought this was kind of odd since I hadn’t turned it on.  My first thought was that my oldest son had decided to come up stairs to watch television.  I thought this not likely, as he was last seen downstairs in front of a much larger television that wasn’t surrounded by “stuff”.

I turned to look in on the two youngest splashing in the tub and heard the television turn off.  I hadn’t stepped away as I could turn my head to look into the bathroom.  Now my only explanation was that Jonah was on the floor crouched behind the baby changing table.  I couldn’t imagine why, but I navigated my way to where he should have been… only to find no one there…

The hairs on the back of my neck stood at attention as I contemplated the possibilities.

The Remote!  The cat must have stepped on the remote!

Problem was, I couldn’t find the remote.  I think it had slid behind the bed which was behind a multitude of things that would have blocked the infrared signal.

No one else was in the room, so no practical joke there…  Holly was still downstairs on the computer and Jonah was watching TV down there as well.

I don’t know what happened for sure…  But I’ve been leaning toward some kind of haunting in our house for quite some time before this incident.

I’ve never had something quite so obvious happen before.  I’ve just had weird feelings and strange bouts of sleep that I couldn’t explain.

I’ve never claimed to be a sensitive or anything.  As far as I can recall the closest thing to a supernatural experience was with a Ouija board in high school where the planchette (the pointy thing) slid all over the board rather erratically spelling out peculiar messages.)

Since moving into this house, more often than not, as I drift off to sleep I get the sensation of a presence and whispering.  I can’t make anything out from the whispering and never see anything, but wake up with a start and a really uneasy feeling.  I don’t recall ever having this happen before moving into our house 3 years ago.

As far as I know there has been no deaths in this house in the 20+ years that it has been standing.  It’s built on the side of what would probably be classified as a sand dune. Our yard is excessively sandy with many many, MANY rocks in it. Oh, and did I mention that we have a lot of rocks in our yard?) They are not unlike those found at our nearby beach.  So I’m guessing there is not an Indian Native American Burial Ground that had been disturbed upon building…

So I’m at a loss for my experiences.  There’s been nothing super specific up until yesterday with that television.  The sleeping thing I can check off to just weird dreams but still annoying.  It’s not particularly scary, just curious…

Along the line of curious, has anyone else had anything peculiar that they’ve encountered that they would like to share?

I’ve been collecting links to webcams around Hawaii for quite a while. In an earlier life, I had even created my own webpage for my personal use to have all the webcams at a mouse-clicks notice. I’m rebuilding that now, but wanted to share one of my new favorite controllable cameras. I suppose you can feel a tad vouyeristic with this, but I just enjoy the tropical scenery…

MMMmmmm Maui…

If you would like to conrol this camera, follow this link and log in with the following:

username: guest
password: maui

My good friend Clifford has had some imbalance in his luck lately. He connects it with Karma which seems to fit pretty well, but I started thinking of the connection with Murphy’s law. It doesn’t necessarily fit his situation perfectly, but it does get me to wondering more about this Murphy guy and his credentials.

I know you’ve all heard of Murphy’s law… “Anything that can go wrong, will.” There are many variations of it, but the meaning pretty much holds true.

For a long time I’ve wondered who this damned Murphy guy was and why he felt that he was so righteous as to make up his own laws to screw around with our lives. My comment when finding myself in a “Murphy’s law” situation had always been that this Murphy guy should be shot. According to his law, that probably wasn’t too far off from what happened to him.

But now I’ve consulted with my new friend Lord Google, coined from my good friend Clifford, and found out just who this Murphy guy was. Here’s an exerpt of the article that explains it:

The following article was excerpted from The Desert Wings
March 3, 1978

Murphy’s Law (”If anything can go wrong, it will”) was born at Edwards Air Force Base in 1949 at North Base.

It was named after Capt. Edward A. Murphy, an engineer working on Air Force Project MX981, (a project) designed to see how much sudden deceleration a person can stand in a crash.

One day, after finding that a transducer was wired wrong, he cursed the technician responsible and said, “If there is any way to do it wrong, he’ll find it.”

The contractor’s project manager kept a list of “laws” and added this one, which he called Murphy’s Law.

Actually, what he did was take an old law that had been around for years in a more basic form and give it a name.

To read more about Murphy, check out this guys site. Pretty interesting if you are into that kind of thing.

As for Murphy himself, I haven’t delved into the research further to find out what happend to him. After learning more about the phrase I don’t necessarily feel that he should be shot. I guess that’s where the phrase, “Don’t shoot the messenger” came from…

Have a great day!

I found an article on FoxNews that was kind of interesting… I’ve heard the statistics before but never paid that close attention to it. My initial inclination was to make a joke about cat hunting, but well, the image of Elmer Fudd hunting Sylvester the cat wasn’t as funny in writing than it was in my head…

Expert: America About to Be Overrun by Feral Cats

U.S. streets could soon be overrun with cats if communities fail to get a handle on growing feline populations, a veterinary medicine researcher says.

The problem is growing numbers of not just strays, but also other free-roaming pet cats. The strays are likely to go unneutered or unspayed, and therefore to reproduce like mad.

On top of that, though, more than 38 million households own an estimated 88 million cats — that’s about one cat for every 3.5 Americans.

We have quite a few outdoor cats in out neighborhood. On occasion one of ours sneaks out and causes all kinds of trouble for the other outdoor cats. Ty is kind of a bully when it comes to the territory around our house.

There are approximately 5 pet cats that spend time outdoors and one that is truly feral. The home owners in the neighborhood are all responsible and in having their pets “fixed”, so our outdoor population is not growing. The only drawback that I see is that we have 0 population in rabbits. I kind of liked seeing them on occasion as a kid growing up, but with outdoor cats, the predation is just too high for those furry rodents.

On the up side, we do not have any mice around.

A number of years ago, my sister-in-law, Nancy Engel, started a cat rescue in my home town of Frankenmuth. Her rescue is a non-profit organization that operates in Michigan, but deals with a network of other rescues around the country. If you are in the Michigan area and would like to check out what cats they have available for adoption visit this link and check out all the kitties.

She started out her organization by finding that there was a feral cat problem in their neighborhood. Instead of trying to trap and have them carted away by the abandoned pet police, she was able to capture them, have them “fixed” and then released either back in the same area, or find a new home on a nearby farm that wanted them.

This is a great cause and I urge anyone who has ever had a cat to check out a cat rescue in your area.

Have a great weekend!

As you can tell, I’ve recently upgrade from my blogger free blog account to this newer high-speed, low-drag blog powered by Wordpress.

I’ve been very happy with the move and am learning new things about it on a daily basis. I wanted to share a few ofmy favorite themes that I have stumbled upon so far. I have been testing them on other sites before implementing them here. That’s why this one still looks a little generic…

These are in no particular order, I just like them for different reasons.

Eye of the Tiger.

As you can see, yes there is a tiger on it. With a little bit of Photoshop, you can revise the banner nicely to fit your own needs. I’m a fan of the 3 column look. I’m planning on implementing one of these soon.

Click the image to download the theme…

The next one is Revved Up.  I really like for two reasons.  One, you can put a nice graphic in the back and have the text fade out the image and overlay it.  It’s pretty nice.  Again, it’s a 3 solumn theme and looks pretty cool too.  I’ll be using this one on a special themed site I’m working on.  It’s currently in production.  Feel free to take a look.

This video was presented to me amung several others. It really surprised me and I’m just a little bit disturbed by it as well. Whether it’s another conspiracy theory or one of those giant cover-up’s made out to look like a conspiracy theory, I don’t know yet.

I haven’t done all the research yet to have a complete informed thought on this. But, this video is definately thought provoking.

You be the judge on this one. Feel free to comment and let me know your thoughts. As I do more research, I’ll post more information. A cursory search showed me that there is growing interest in this subject. Wikipedia gives a brief description as this:

The North American Union (abbreviated NAU) is a theoretical continental union of Canada, Mexico and the United States similar in structure to the European Union, sometimes including a common currency called the Amero. Officials from all three nations have said there are no government plans to create such a union,^[1] although the idea has been discussed and proposed in academic and scholarly circles, either as a union or as a North American Community (see Independent Task Force on North America).

The formation of a North American Union has been the subject of various conspiracy theories.

Let me know what you think…