Following up on my ScanGauge Installation, here are some of the typical gas mileages I’m seeing:
These are all for a 1998 Nissan Maxima with a manual transmission and a Yakima roof rack with two bike trays. The EPA estimates are 22 mpg city and 27 mpg highway.
Finding myself single again, I’ve thrown my hat back into the circus ring of online dating. While this is a bit depressing, it does provide for good entertainment and blog fodder.
Plenty of Fish is a free site, so you’re not out any money if you don’t meet anyone. The tradeoff is that you lose some functionality and features. Indeed, while simplicity is Plenty of Fish’s strength, it’s also its biggest limitation.
The profiles are quick and simple; not many things to select or fill out. You can have multiple photos, but they’re very shrunken and sometimes oddly proportioned. The downside is that you don’t have much to search on, primarily age and location. You also can’t hide profiles you’ve already seen, so browsing involves a lot of repeats.
One unique feature Plenty of Fish does offer is an answer to the question, “Did they read my message?” For each sent message, it tells you whether it’s been read and/or deleted, so you at least get an idea of what happened.
In summary, Plenty of Fish is simple, which is good and bad, but it does the job as a free alternative to more sophisticated sites.
My cousin Patti got married to Bobby in Cleveland, Ohio. Bobby’s son David was the ring bearer, Patti’s sister Theresa the maid of honor, and my Dad escorted my Aunt Jean and gave Patti away in the ceremony. Theresa’s seven-month old daughter, Gabrielle did her best to steal the show, though.
Photography was tricky in the dimly lit church and reception, though I did explore enough of my manual settings to turn off the ineffectual flash and force a higher speed of ISO 800. Without a tripod, this was still hit or miss yielding grainy or blurry shots. Catching Mackenzie and David in the natural light on the patio made for a much cleaner photo.
The Wall Street Journal had an article this week on how more twenty-something women are seeking fertility treatment at the first delay in conception:
“It’s the whole culture of wanting to have a baby when they want to have a baby,” says Cheri Lowre, an obstetrician-gynecologist and assistant clinical professor at University of California, Los Angeles’s medical school, who says she sees young women who want to plan their pregnancies around vacations or graduate school. “But getting pregnant takes time, it’s not a no-brainer.”
I laughed a little because I’ve met women who have exactly that mindset. Ambitious and driven, yes, but also lacking a certain grasp of reality and an ability to compromise.
One woman I dated last year in particular came to mind. She was a med student in Philadelphia, smart and fit, and we found plenty to talk about on the first date. Everything had to be to her convenience, though. Email instead of phone calls, even after meeting in person, and the second date discussion started with when I was coming into the city again on her schedule. Needless to say, things didn’t work out.
It was a beautiful sunset Thursday night driving westward to Ohio. The red sun sunk quickly into the horizon and lit up the sweeping clouds well into the twilight.
The sun also set abruptly on my relationship with Maria. My family and I had expected her to accompany us to my cousin Patti’s wedding, but after a week of ignored phone calls and her failure to show up for the trip, it became clear that we were done.
Things had been a bit odd for the last two weeks; her presence was more distant and we found little to talk about. I tried to silence my often overthinking mind and disquieted gut feeling, though, and let time run its course. It did just that, albeit quicker than expected. Perhaps my instincts aren’t so off afterwards.
One of those things about becoming an adult and a professional is that you aspire to have a career, not just a job. And for most of my post-college life, I thought I had just that. Good corporate job, lots of resources, lots of opportunties. Management even made career development a major talking point.
Unfortunately, that’s all they made it: talk. The impetus for action is thrown onto you, along with every other responsibility. While a career is something that you certainly own more than anyone else, you can’t build one alone. In particular, taking on greater roles and responsibilities requires management’s blessing, or at least their acknowledgement of the accomplishment.
In the last six years, I’ve put in a lot of effort, though it never seems to impress the right people or capture the current management fad. And so I’m left with a job that has dwindling prospects of still becoming a satisfying career. I still believe that you need to invest in your career, but like any investment, I’ve learned that it makes all the difference which company you choose.
After washing my Camelbak, I took stock of all the stuff I lug around on the typical mountian bike ride:
A long Fourth of July weekend provided plenty of time to relax and take a walking photo safari around the neighborhood.
