X Marks the spot

I am now in Southern California.

You see, today is my mother’s birthday, so I drove down and surprised her at the door as my present. It’s a six-hour drive usually, so I took off of work early, although not as early as I should have to avoid traffic. I stopped by home, then filled up my gas tank for the low low price of $1.179/gal, which I had to wait for, then the comic store, then got in the car, and caught a bit of the Gilroy traffic (only a year and a half until they widen that freeway to six lanes all the way). I actually made decent time. When I made my usual dinner stop at Buttonwillow, I noticed the gas price was $1.099 coming off the ramp, which I found interesting.

I then saw one for $0.969. Then $0.929. Then $0.899. At this point I freaked out because I’d never seen gasoline that cheap, and this was highway [robbery] prices.

Man, we bay-area folks are getting reamed on gas prices.

Once again, I started to wish that I had a CD-changer in my car, although I’m getting pretty good at changing the CD while never taking my eyes off the road. I have to choose at random, though, so I came up with this little system to make sure the next CD was suitably random. When the current CD ran out, I looked at the last three digits of the next license plate I saw. If the first was odd, I would move forward in my CD booklet, even I’d move backwards. The second digit was how many pages I’d move, and the third was which position, 1-8 on the page of the CD. (If it were a 9 or 0, I’d re-pick, this never happened, though.)

And I’m sure you really all cared about that.

As for the subject of this entry, as I was coming through the Grapevine, there was a weird ‘X’ in the sky that I couldn’t quite see. As far as I figure, it was two large jet contrails crossing each other, but it was still rather freaky-looking.

Now I’m at home, on my mom’s computer. Modem is so slow… I miss my DSL.