Puddle Jumping in DC
n : persistent determination [syn: application, backbone, balls, chutzpah, clock, courage, determination, doggedness, firmness, grit, guts, gutsiness, guttiness, heart, inflexibility, intestinal fortitude, intransigence, moxie, nerve, obduracy, obstinacy, perseverance, persistence, pertinacity, resoluteness, resolution, resolve, spunk, starch, staunchness, steadfastness, stick-to-itiveness, stomach, stubbornness, true grit, willfulness
ant: indifference, slackness, weakness]
If you were using the human eye, which is much more sensitive than anything you can buy, to view this (rather than my cute little Pentax OptioS5z), you could tell that these are, indeed, clover growing deep in the Tenleytown metro station.
But it is convenient for me that so many people do.
One of the downsides to loosing 25-30lbs (there aren't many) is that, rather suddenly, none of your clothes fit. Over Christmas, I bought two pairs of pants but alternating them didn't make for much wardrobe variety. So, yesterday, I spent an hour at Value Village filling a cart that replaced more than 50% of my non-athletic wardrobe, including three very nice suits (not pictured) for $110.
An upside that I discovered today is that I can finally breathe in plow: 
What would have induced Sylvia Poggioli to utter "oh, s**t" and vanish off the air during her olympics report on All Things Considered yesterday?I haven't listened but, I'm sure it's been edited out of the webcast.
Well, this is part of the plan (see below). We finally got (mostly) finished and Tom moved in! He slept in his new apartment last night, showered in it this morning, and hasn't come running upstairs screaming about anything falling down . . . that's good.
Send her an official student loan statement that looks something like:
AMOUNT OF LOANS $67,901.77 
I figured out that multiple loan consolidations to lock in interest rates were being added up so it's not really that high. Still, we have been adding to what I carried over from undergrad . . .
Ending Balance – as of 12/31/2005 $32,801.67 (whimper)
Cumulative Interest Paid $7,385.17 (whimper, whimper).
Someone promise me that this is an investment even though I've done (and will continue to do) wacky things like work for non-profits and marry an artist 
.
"Senior administration officials acknowledged Wednesday that even if the president's push for substitutes for gasoline and diesel were successful, the reliance on Persian Gulf oil by world markets - including the U.S. market - is unlikely to change.
Bush's main message, however, was about priming the budgets of federal laboratories and agencies to foster basic science research and strengthening math and science education." - Associated Press
Oh. Unfortunately, the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere very seriously have increased by at least 30%, methane has doubled, and nitrous oxides have increaased by 15-20% in the last two centuries and we are seriously expecting an increase in global surface temperatures by 2 to 10 degrees by the end of this next century. (Rabe again)
The president spoke last night and Mac, Tom and I hid in the basement. Ok, that's more dramatic than it sounds. We were installing moulding and trying to get the kitchen drain hooked up (still need one more part).
From the recap news stories, I've found out that George W. proposed the U.S. reduce it's dependence on foreign oil by 75% by 2025. Now, the U.S. consumes about 20 million barrels of oil per day and about 12.3 million of that is imported (1). If those numbers stayed the same (which they won't), to reduce our oil imports by 75%, we need to conserve or find domestic sources for 9.2 million barrels per day or 3.4 billion barrels per year (the Arctic Refuge is estimated to contain a total of somewhere between 9 and 16 billion barrels but only ~3 billion that would be profitable to pump out, by the way (2))
Since the president doesn't seem to want to increase auto fuel efficiency (cars being our #1 use of oil by far; about 2/3 of everything we use (3)), that's a pretty tall order. Ya see, U.S. oil production peaked in 1970 and we have approximately 22 billion barrels of proven reserves to tap into (4). The only way to reduce the amount of foreign oil that we use is to reduce the total amount of oil that we use.
Exxon Mobil, which made a record breaking $25 billion in profits last year, isn't going to like that very much. To put that in perspective, let's compare ExxonMobil's profits to the gross domestic products (GDP, the sum of all the goods and services sold) of a few countries:
Cote d'Ivoire $ 24.8 billion in 2005, making it the 106th largest country by GDP
Zimbabwe $ 24.0 b.
Bolivia $ 23.6 b.
Qatar $ 22.5 b.
Panama $ 22.2 b.
Estonia $ 21.8 b. . . . and that's just profits. (5)
Should we talk about sales volume? Exxon moved $263.99 billion in product last year. (6) That's more than
Switzerland $ 262.1 billion, making it the 37th largest country by GDP,
Hong Kong $ 254.2 b. (yes, world financial markets calculate this separately from China),
Vietnam $ 251.8 b.,
Malaysia $ 248.0 b., and
Greece $ 242.8 b.. (5)
What's amazing is that, somehow, ExxonMobil can't find the money to just pay the $3 billion in punitive damages they were supposed to from the ExxonValdez oil spill 16 years ago (7). Perhaps the Exxon CEO should hear how you think he should cough it up and clean up his act.
Don't want to watch think about the math? Watch the flash file then: 
(1) Independent Petroleum Association of New Mexico
(2) SavetheArctic.com
(3) & (4) U.S. Department of Energy: Demand, Reserves
(5) CIA World Factbook
(6) Forbes Magazine
(7) Houston Chronicle
Additionally, only 6 countries emitted more than the state of Texas! In fact, if you compare emissions from the 50 states to world countries, 17 of them rank in the top 50 global emitters!
I'm reading Statehouse and Greenhouse by Barry Rabe, whom I considered studying under at the University of Michigan. I'm on page 5.
How am I figuring that? Ok, by car, it's 10 miles from my house to campus. $2.35 isn't that different than the cost of a gallon of gas and I can get to campus, probably, 2.5 times on a gallon. Now, assuming the capital outlay of purchasing a car is a fixed cost and not relevant to the per trip cost (this is a standard microeconomic technique), even incorporating the cost of wear and tear on the car over 10 miles isn't going to make driving more expensive than taking the train. Since taking the metro is also longer (about twice as long) since it's an arterial system designed to take people to and from the center of the system rather than around the city, the decision for car owners is really about whether the value of reading on the train for a hour is worth more than 1/2 a gallon of gasoline and the 1/2 hour extra time the commute takes (and, for some of us, the enjoyment/excercise value of biking one way) . . . .
My point is: it should be no surprise to anyone that public transportation isn't getting the majority of commuters out of their cars. Once you've bought a car, it's cheaper and easier to drive . . . especially if you have to drive to get to the metro in the first place . . . and yet fares keep going up.
Now, parking
may actually be the cost factor that tips the scales but, in my case, the annual parking fee is quite modest. However, we've only got the one car and Mac uses it to commute to Towson, where, according to Maryland's online public transit planner, it is not possible to get to in one day by public transportation . . . but that's a whole other story.
It's late, I should stop doing math.
