Paid $3.99 per gallon for gasoline this morning.  I don’t think I’ll  be able to avoid $4.00 much longer.

I haven’t really had a puppy since I was living in Togo in 1995-96, and I’m very out of practice.  Where Pongo earned his puppy bones by brazenly trying to chew through the leg of a coffee table, Diego’s been much more subtle.  You’d wake up to find the in-soles removed from the shoes, or a blizzard made from the used Kleenexes, but by the time you find him he’s rooms away from the scene of the crime batting his big brown eyes and and doing his what?-who?-me? routine. 

Then three books were destroyed in the last week (two caught red-handed) and several attacks were noted on innocent shoes.  Miscellaneous damage includes one pair of headphones, a couple of throw-pillow tags, and the premature demise of a squeaky toy that he only received last Wednesday.  One bright lesson: the child-proof caps on Spinner’s cold meds work.  The downside: Diego made a pretty good effort at going in through the bottom of the bottle, and probably would have succeeded given another ten minutes.

At fifteen-months-old I thought we’d be past this, but I guess not.  Time to get serious on the training.

Just spent a big chunk of my Monday morning parked on the I-15.  This is what happens when someone mixes a semi truck, two SUVs and an assortment of smaller cars and scatter them around five lines of concrete.  People get told to park.  Or at least would have been told if there was news on the radio instead of a pledge drive. 

But while parked there where the highway passes through Rancho Bernardo, one of the Wisteria Lanes of San Diego, there was a bright spot.  A shimmering beacon of day glo orange shorts on a hilltop, surrounded by a sea of conforming suburban strip-malls.  Hooters!  And more importantly, The Girls Of Hooters!

Sure the restaurant was maligned by the locals when it opened a few years back.  Suburban wags opined that Hooters’ presence would give RB a bad reputation.  From my perspective it gave them a dining after dark option, but I never exercised that option.  But today they showed their community spirit.  While everyone sat and waited in the 90 degree heat, the girls stood on the hillside overlooking the freeway and did their best little cheer leader routines to pump up drivers’ spirits.  Their day-glo orange shorts gave us something to look at besides the backend of the car in front of you.  They waved.  They jiggled.  They got the truckers to blow their horns.  They jiggled some more.  They showed their community spirit(s). 

Of course, for all I know their little antics are what caused the semi, the SUVs and the others to become the pile of mangled metal they are now, but still it was nice to see people out there trying to brighten the days of others less fortunate.  If only they could have served drinks… 

Sunday night ended with Spinner pointing out that our voracious little reader had devoured the spine and back cover of Orson Scott Card’s Xenocide, and Monday morning started with Joe pointing out that someone had hacked Spinner’s site. 

The week is not boding well at this point.

Temps here are supposed to be in the 90s for the third day in a row, and I’m really contemplating doubling up the Naproxen and plowing through a nice, long swim.  I can deal with the consequences to the various tendons later, but I really think I’m going to need the mental aspects of a good swim today. 

[via Mike and Zane]

Which Doctor would you choose as her running mate?

I was supposed to be heading to a slack-filled weekend in Bakersfield this weekend while Spinner did his freelance thing.  Instead I’m home on various meds trying to get the new “improved” WordPress to bend to my will.

Two hours since yesterday’s upgrade to 2.5.1 getting the WYSIWIG editor functioning.  Now the issue is that I can have better permalink URLs, or a functioning RSS feed, but apparantly not both, despite the fact that this issue was supposed to be fixed by the upgrade to 2.5.1.   And I’m really not liking the new user interface on the backend of WordPress.   Too much wasted space, and too much scrolling to find the necessary tools. 

Not thinking of changing though.  I’ve burned through Blogger and Moveable Type on this site, and use Expression Engine for another project.  I might need to vent about WordPress from time to time, but it’s still the best product out there.

Spinner has a good post on yesterday’s shark attack at Fletcher Cove.  For those of you who’ve escaped the fear-based round-the-clock news coverage, here’s a bit from the Union-Tribune, and good reporting from the L.A. Times and S.F. Gate.

Three area codes aren’t enough for San Diego county, so let me be the first to welcome you to the brand-spanking new 442. 

Since the three existing area codes have a theoretical capacity of 29,999,997 phone numbers, and 10.2 phone numbers per man, woman and child weren’t enough for the 2,941,454 people who live here, any guesses on how long we can go before we saturate the 442? 

OK, I would have been happiest if the Grateful Dead archives were going to Cal, and most despondent if they’d gone to Stanford.  At least with this option they stay within the system.  Go Slugs!

OK, not in this case, but c’mon.  Five people hospitalized, including one that needed CPR after being pulled from the pool? This is taking that synchronization-thing too far.   

On the other hand, I can see a newfound opportunity for some drama-filled color commentary during the upcoming Olympics.