Memorial Day Weekend

I'm sitting at home this Memorial Day weekend mainly because of the high gas prices. Watching all the news reports about the traffic makes me think that I'm the only one who is too cheap to travel this weekend. I can still look out my window and see flowers, green grass and oak trees, so it's not that bad here. Have we all been brainwashed into thinking that we need to travel somewhere every time we get an extra day off from work?

This week went by fast. Now that the long weekend is here I'm going to be working on some of those projects that I never seem to have time for. I just finished reading a book about a guy who tried to be an Elvis impersonator. It was kind of interesting reading about how he prepared for live performances and contests. I watched the Elvis in Hawaii concert on DVD, which I had not seen in quite a while. That guy knew how to sing and put on a show. What I'd give for an ounce of his charisma. Thankyouverymuch... I'll be here all weekend.

Recipe Search Finished

I finally finished the recipe search page on poetlady.com. It is very much like the poetry search page. There isn't too much in the database right now, only nine recipes. But hopefully it will be easier for poetlady to add more. I thought about allowing anyone to add to the database. But there are other recipe and poetry public databases that we would be competing with. poetlady did have a public message board at one time, but removing spam messages was taking too much of my time. What's next? Well, I plan on putting up a student loan page on poetlady's site and of course finish editing our novel "In a Sense of Love". But right now it's late and I'm typing on a wireless laptop that could loose its connection to the Internet at any moment. So, until next week, have a good one.

Web Update

I would comment on how nice the weather has been this week, but by the time anyone reads this, it will probably be raining here. To your left is a picture of my cat showing off his white belly fur. My girlfriend is trying to teach him go roll over. Good luck!

Right now I'm trying to finish the recipe search program for poetlady.com. Not too difficult, it's just finding the time to get it done while I work on web sites and seminar videos. I have also started working on the last few chapters of my girlfriends novel. I've been trying to wrap that up for almost a year now because she has moved on to other writing projects. Curiously, we received a rejection letter from a publisher this week. The publisher was responding to a query letter that we had mailed over a year ago! Nice of them to get back to us. We sent out about six queries back then and most of them responded within two months. I am not sure I want to go that route again. The rejection letters I don't mind, it's the waiting for them to respond that I don't care for. Self publishing looks like the best option for us. Since I have a client who is doing that with his book, I will be able to see how the whole process works. Most people are lucky to break even when they self publish. That part worries me a bit. But if the story is interesting and writing is good, maybe there is still a chance that we'll get lucky ...someday.

Gas Budget

Lets see, what can I complain about this week. Oh yeah, the price of gas. Just a few weeks ago I was commenting on how it was going to restrict my summer travel because gas was $2.89 a gallon. Well, this week it is up to $3.15 a gallon. That's a 9 percent increase in just two weeks and I heard in the news that the price could go much higher by summer. The politicians are saying that Ethanol made from corn will reduce our dependency on foreign oil. But the problem with Ethanol is that it takes too much energy to produce. The net result is that we will not be paying any less for fuel in the future. The only solution is to increase the mileage that our vehicles get from each gallon. Unfortunately, congress is just starting to discuss legislation that will require higher mileage standards. The estimate I heard was for new standards to be implemented by 2018, roughly ten years from now. Can you imagine what the price of gas will be by then?