Gas Shortages and the Credit Crisis, Cleaning up the lake

Gas Shortages and the Credit Crisis

I've been riding my motorcycle to work now for the last two weeks. This has stretched my gas budget quite a bit. The weather has been great. Since the hurricanes hit the East coast and the Gulf coast there have been reports of gas shortages. If you do a Google search at this time, you'll see pumps are running dry in Georgia, North Carolina, Texas, and parts of Tennessee. The issue seems to be that refineries were cutting production prior to the storm, so they could switch blends. This forced a shortage at the time the credit crisis is building to a head. Here in Central AR some stations only have regular, no premium or mid-grade.

The credit crisis has me wondering what the heck is going on. There needs to be some sort of solution. I hope we're not looking at the new milenniums version of the Great Depression. I realize with fossil fuels in short supply, and a need to move to new energy that a change is coming... but it's a very uncertain time, or seems that way.

Lake Cleanup

My team at work did some volunteer work at Lake Willastein in Maumelle today. I brought my Kayak and cleaned the shoreline and picked up stuff in the water. It was VERY nasty. It seems fishermen have no respect for the lake they enjoy fishing in. They dump beer bottles, beer cans, skoal cans, etc... in the lake. I found a gun case in the lake, and a bunch of other nasty stuff. Filled three 30 gallon bags with trash from the 1/2 of the lake I was able to clean in 3 hours. I saw a crane, a copperhead sunning itself on a board, turtles, ducks, etc. Several people thanked us for cleaning up. It's a great park. Some of the stuff in the lake were energy drinks, and health supplements. So joggers and runners and bicyclists also throw their stuff in the water. Pretty sad, they work so hard to keep their bodies fit but make the lake itself unfit. Hopefully people will not be such pigs, but cleanups like this will have to continue to just keep things decent.

BTW. This blog entry is written on my new Acer Aspire One netbook, with 1 gig of memory, and a 160 gig hard drive... from my couch. :-)