• I've got a bunch of USPS "Forever" series stamps which will soon go up in price again. We've gotten to the point where they don't even bother replacing the stamps when they raise prices, and never get around to actually printing up first class stamps with the price noted on them anymore. It probably has something to do with the fact that nobody I know really uses them much these days. I have exactly one bill per month that requires a stamp. Everything else is electronic. When I finally move out of this rental place, that bill will go away too, leaving only taxes as my final reason for using the USPS at all. I suspect that over time, the post office as we know it will go away and mail delivery to residential addresses will turn into a once-a-week kind of thing. It just won't be worth doing anymore. Fine with me, as it'll mean less junk mail. In the meantime, I still have a couple of dozen stamps. A couple of years worth at my current use rate.
• Even with the ski season effectively over, there is still a huge amount of snowpack in the mountains. I'm beginning to think that I'll really regret it if I don't get myself on a Yampa River trip in early June for what may very well be the biggest flows of the decade.
• It's time for me to renew my Wilderness First Responder (WFR) certification. Looks like another trip to San Diego this time, though this time we'll be at UCSD not USD. Convenient as a cousin's brother and his family live right down the road in La Jolla.
• I haven't said anything about the Fed because there's really not much to say. As has been noted in many places, the Fed has made its motives clear: They're there to bail out the big banks and bankers, and if they need to sink the economy and destroy the dollar to do it, that's fine with them. Sadly, the results will ultimately not save the banks and will destroy everything else.
• I am not much of a political creature, but it's nice to see a guy I went to school with doing so well. And I'm increasingly pissed off at "The Clintons" and their allies apparently putting me and many others like me into the category of "traitors." Let's get things straight: I voted for Bill Clinton twice because I felt he was the better guy for the job both times. I didn't swear alleigance to the Clinton family, didn't support his wife, or his daughter, or any of their other friends, and don't appreciate those who feel that somehow I "owe" Hillary anything. My vote for her husband was strictly for him, and doesn't automatically transfer to other members of his family. We don't have royal families here, regardless of how much as some (Bushes, Clintons, Kennedys) might dislike that reality. If Hillary Clinton wanted my vote she needed to earn it. She didn't. Her husband did. This year Obama did. All seperate decsions. End of story.
• I really wish it would warm up a bit more. I've got a nice used sit on top kayak and would love to get out in it, even for a quick paddle around the Venice canals or through Marina Del Rey. Got to do something now that the skiing is over.
• It's been a year since I've had my Prius. I continue to be impressed with how nice a package it is. Unlike most other hybrids which are based on conventional vehicles, this one actually works really well without many sacrifices. All the others end up with all the disadvantages of the vehicles they are based on, plus all the disadvantages of the hybrid technology, like the need to sacrifice trunk space to shove in a battery. They Prius, which is designed from the ground up around the hybrid drivetrain, avoids many of these pitfalls and manages to put together a very nice package of features, all without a huge markup above what you would pay for a traditional vehicle with similar features and interior space.

  I suspect over time we'll see more vehicles like this, and perhaps some vehicles that are designed from the ground up to be adaptable to different types of drivetrains without giving one the feeling that the non-gasoline features were clumsily added on after the fact (which they were). It's mostly simple stuff like modularizing the vehicle. For example making it possible for a car to have either a large gas tank, or a small gas tank plus a batter, or a natural gas tank, or perhaps even just a single large battery, all of which could be fit into the same space.

[Edited for formatting, May 8 10:08]

-btc