preraphaelitepunk.com

Same Story, Another Station

Originally uploaded by moria.

So it would seem that I picked a bad day to be low on gas (the beeper beeped over lunch, indicating that I’m down to 1/8 of a tank, which is always annoying because the gage becomes unreliable when it’s that low, and I can never tell how much I really have left). All three stations I passed on the way home, including the one I’d made a detour to pass so I could theoretically buy that rare substance, diesel, of which you may have heard myths, were absolutely, ridiculously packed. I managed to get rather poorly framed pictures of the two stations closest to my home.

I mean, really! This is ridiculous. So gas might be going up in price again? What a shock. Is it really worth people’s time and idling fumes to buy gas 20 or 30 cents cheaper than it will be in a few days’ time? Meanwhile, those who actually need to buy fuel can’t get in, because the money-grubbing twerps who want to top up and possibly save a dollar or two are blocking all the entrances.

At any rate, I should be able to make it to work tomorrow, but I’ll absolutely have to buy gas over lunch then. I hope some of the feeding frenzy will have ebbed by then, because otherwise I may have to get rather sharp with people.

And let me just say that diesel, despite popular misconception, is not cheaper than gasoline, and is not actually that easy to find — especially if you prefer to pay at the pump. The last time I filled up, about 460 miles ago (maybe, um, two or three weeks ago?), I paid the same exact price that they were charging for premium. Some places, it’s even higher than premium. So fair warning: the next person who tells me that diesel is so much cheaper than gasoline is seriously going to get slapped. Seriously.

I finally managed to get around to making chocolate chip cookies (vegan, of course), having grown weary of paying $1.50 a pop for vegan cookies from Whole Foods. I only baked about half the dough, and got five huge cookies about 5 inches in diameter. Those will certainly hold me for quite a while, and I’ll have the rest of the dough for later baking. Plus, now the whole flat smells like baking cookies. Mmmm.

Update: Flickr seems somewhat confused when it tries to post pics here: it keeps telling me that the entry has failed, but the blog itself seems to think it went through perfectly fine, so I wound up with three identical postings and two identical test posts from Flickr. ::sigh:: Weird. I’ll sort it out later.

Right. I’ve got a very bare-bones About page up and working, I think, and I’ve added some links to my blogroll. Minor tweaks, but every little bit of functionality I can get at this point makes me happy. I’ve also installed a plugin for mood-based quotes, but I haven’t yet isolated the quotes I want to use, so it’s not turned on yet; I hope to get that up and running sometime this week.

It would seem that the kind people at BlueHost are unfamiliar with the PreRaphaelite brotherhood. I just received my confirmation call from them, checking to make sure I really am who I said I am, etc., and everything was going smoothly until the nice man on the other end of the line tried to pronounce my URL. There was a long pause, then, slowly, “preeee-rap-hell-light-eee-punk?”

Rather cute, in a vaguely pathetic sort of way. I mean, the PreRaphaelites aren’t all that obscure.

At any rate, this is my lovely new site. Please bear with me as I learn the ins and outs of WordPress and the art of manipulating templates, figuring out what I’m doing and how to find and manipulate the particular widgets to let me do what I want to do with this site. Progress may be somewhat erratic for a while; consider yourself warned.

Update: Just a reminder/warning that basically none of the links, except the Flickr badge, really work at this point. It’s always good to leave some tasks for later. Yeah, that’s it. I’m also not sure about the template: it’s not bad, but the margins are awfully wide and, despite having spent the last hour trying to figure out where the settings are so I can mod them, I can’t seem to expand the text space width. Oh well. It’ll get there eventually.