toastykitten

I drive a Honda Civic. It is not a hybrid, but it gets 38 mpg on the freeway. Anyway, because I take the train to work, I hardly ever have to fill it up.

Yesterday I filled it up. It cost me nearly $40!

Geez.

At least I won't be filling it up again for another month, maybe month and a half.

I'm typing this on Mark's computer right now (he's up in Portland discussing a new open-source project with people in Linux) and I feel really relaxed. Which is good, because today was one of those days where I spent all day doing something, and I realized at 4:00 pm, I could have done it a different way and it would have taken me half an hour instead of all day. Grr...

I haven't been posting here much, but that's because I've been totally distracted by Yelp, this social network thingie where the hook is that its users review everything, from restaurants to random stores. I blame angeeela for this new addiction. I even got a message from someone I didn't know!

We watched Cars over the weekend. I really liked it, but I didn't love it like I did The Incredibles. It's the most contemporary of the Pixar movies - meaning that they've picked up on Dreamworks' schtick of sticking current pop-culture jokes in there - Schwarzenegger as Hummer,import cars straight out of Fast and the Furious, etc. The story itself is solid; the movie drags a bit in places, but the ending is very, very sweet. For the first half hour, I kept trying to figure out how in a world of cars, things get made - are cars born from older cars? How come they still have wood doors? After that, though, the story sucked me in, along with all the different cars' personalities, from Paul Newman to George Carlin to Tony Shalhoub. It was great.

Oh, and if you watch this, definitely stay for the end credits. The cutest Pixar goodies yet.

In the previews for upcoming cartoon movies, we noticed a trend emerging - animals fighting against humans. Is this a prediction of things to come, as polar bears start to each other and perhaps may come to prey on us?

Speaking of cars, Mark's latest obsession is car races, specifically the Indy500. He doesn't like Nascar, and insists that they're different, even though to me they both look like cars going in circles for several hundred pointless laps. It's boring. What is the point of going in circles? Where's the challenge in that? Cars, the movie, actually made a Nascar race look interesting for a while, but seeing the live races just don't do it for me.

Podcast interview with John Lasseter, animator and chief creative executive at Pixar

Cars Wikipedia page

1. Work has been insanely busy. That's good for me, because I am no longer bored.
2. I've been listening to NPR a lot. I don't listen to the stream, because I know it'll just piss me off. Instead, I picked the stuff that looked interesting and listened to those, such as Rebuilding Chinatown After the 1906 Quake, Gauging the Benefits of a Living Wage in L.A., and A Chat with Beverly Cleary
3. It's Beverly Cleary's 90th birthday! Her publisher is celebrating by declaring today Drop Everything And Read Day. I loved her stories, especially Ramona Quimby, Age 8 and the Mouse & the Motorcycle.
4. No Good For Me is one of my favorite fashion blogs. When did she start doing one for Jane?
5. Kaitlin is a card shark with more skills than Chinese men who've been playing for decades. While playing Chor Dai Jee (or Dai or Die or whatever the hell you call it), she beat me, my sister, Mark, and her mom several times. Too bad we cannot take her to Vegas with us.
6. Hey, remember when you were drooling over the revelation that the next Toyota Prius might get close to 100 mpg? Well, I took a random old issue of Dwell magazine with me to read on the train today, and came across this little nugget:

The VW 1-Liter Car

One mizzling day in April, Dr. Ferdinand Piech of Volkswagen broke an uncommon world record on the autobahn. His tortoise-like jet-black car consumed less than one liter of gas per 100 kilometers -- 239 miles per gallon. A concept car last spring, the 1-Liter is embarking on new developments. The two-seater is not a hybrid, but conserves through engine redesign, weight-saving measures, and aerodynamics. Updates at VWVortex. (I don't see any mention of this car on the website but I haven't dug very far.)

Yah, so this little blurb is from Jan/Feb 2003.

7. Did taxes. That was painful.

Anyway, I gotta pack. Later.