New gas price signs are electronic - Why??

So there I was putting $8,976 worth of gas into the Girl Jalopy the other day, it was when I noticed that the street sign the station had out front had been changed.  Not the pricing mind you but the mechanism itself.  In days of old the signs were a pretty manual operation, with plastic or metal numbers that were arranged in the correct order to let us know the price per gallon.  Some employee would wander out there every once in a blue moon and rearrange the numbers with a pole that had a suction cup on the end of it when the price of gas went up, all of them but that 9/10ths of a cent (I will talk about that later).

I was talking to the manager of the Gate station where I stop for gas most times, and she told me that she has changed the price on her street sign up to 5 times in one day.  I was completely shocked by this – 5 times in one day, REALLY???  That had more to do with competition with a neighboring Hess station than the anything to do with the cost of a barrel of oil.  So out she went, five times with her pole suction cup and pulled all the numbers off the regular, mid-grade and high test prices, on both sides of the sign and changed them.  She explained that she was not tremendously happy with Corporate that on that day.  Those types of signs are all I really remember, I am 46 but I bet there was some other method before that, or maybe you just drove in and the attendant told you what the cost was before filling the tank and cleaning your windows.  I do remember that and I do remember liking it when someone did clean the windows, I hate cleaning the windows.

I will swing out on a tangential course for a second and talk about the barrel of oil.  Back in the early days of oil production up in Pennsylvania they had nothing to store the oil in so they started using old whiskey barrels, which at that time were either 40 gallons or 45 gallons.  Cheap free barrels that were a left over from some other industry, those early Americans were an ingenious lot that gives a whole new meaning to the going green.   The origins of the 42-gallon oil barrel that is used today for measuring oil are somewhat obscure.  Best I can tell it happened around 1866 when the oil producers were trying to eliminate confusion by standardizing the size of the barrels.  The agreed that a standard 40 gallon allotment would be what a barrel of oil held.  To be fair they added 2 gallons to ensure that any measurement errors would always be in the buyer's favor as an additional way of assuring buyer confidence, apparently on the same principle as is behind the bakers dozen.  By 1872 the standard oil barrel was firmly established as 42 US gallons.  I suppose when talking about the oil spill in the gulf it was easier to say we spilled 430,000 barrels instead of using a unit of measure we can all understand, like 18,060,000 gallons, over 18 million gallons.

So back to the electronic gas pump signs.  When the street sign was a manual apparatus they also had to change the electronics for the pump itself, a two-step operation.  Change the sign, and then change the pumps “brains” to start actually charging the new price.  Back in the day to change the price on the pump it was a manual operation that required someone with some tools to open the pump up and change a set of gears, they were strictly mechanical.   So they would change out the gears and that change in gear ratio would cause the cost numbers on the pump to match up with the gallons pumped using the new price.  Can you imagine a clerk from your gas station actually going out to the pump and changing the gear ratio on the dials – makes me laugh to even consider it. 

So back to that 9/10ths, I could not find out a lot about when this started, it seems that the practice originated at least as far back as the 1920s or 1930s.  That was about the time Henry Ford started pumping out tin lizzies, the venerable model T and the price was an impossible to believe 290 bucks, even using todays numbers that is only 3,800 bucks, he pumped out over 15 million of those cars.  Anyway, some say that the fractional pricing was introduced in response to federal gasoline taxes, others say that tiny price changes of a tenth of a cent were more significant back when a gallon of gasoline didn't cost much more than a dime. For whatever the reason we are still stuck with it and for no real reason I could find.  I would like to think that that extra 9/10ths of a cent is put into a fund to combat oil spills, such as the one in the Gulf of Mexico recently. 

So now we have the electronic gas station sign out by the street, allowing them to change the price at the pump with nothing more than a few keyboard pecks and a click of the mouse.  The pumps are now tied to the sign at the street, when the sign is changed, the price at the pump is changed.  I am still not sure how but they must not be able to do that while someone is pumping gas, that would send me into a tirade.  Start pumping at 3.49 a gallon and by the time I am done be paying $3.55 a gallon.  I suspect that the pump only changes after the current user has completed his transaction.   Not sure what the world has come to, I mean we live in a world where it is important to be able to change the price of gas as many times as we wish in any specific day.  When you think about that for a while it will make you just sit in dumbfounded amazement, or at least it did me. 

So before filling up the tank, look at the price and verify it has not changed by the time you complete pumping operations.

Scanning back over my life I realize something – is it not funny as hell where we end up!!

As I sit this morning at the computer poking around on face book I just got tickled after electronically chatting with an old friend from high school.  I have not seen him since high school, we were actual friends then but now we are more electronic friends.  That in itself seems weird to say but the social media has allowed us to reconnect.  I wonder if it has really allowed us to rekindle friendship from days gone by.  In this case, it was probably graduation in 1983 since I saw him and best I can remember I was stoned and drunk so most likely I would not remember even if I did see him. 

Anyway, he is now a preacher of a small church in a small town in Ohio and I would have NEVER guessed back then that he would be a preacher when we got to our mid-forties.  I have been somewhat retrospective lately anyway and after chatting with my friend maybe even more so.  I got to looking at the course my life has taken – what a ride I have gotten to be on!!!  I have been very blessed on my ride so far, great experiences, great friends along the way and a wonderful Bride who can tolerate the truckload of idiosyncratic behaviors I bring along with me, and she acts like I don’t have them.  I love that woman more than anything else in the world, and she loves me even more than that and I find a lot of solace and balance in that knowledge. 

Has the ride always been peaches and cream, hell no!!  But I did not and still don’t dwell on the bumps longer than I had to in order to extract the good or the lesson from them.  I have many friends that I have reconnected with using the social media, which span from grade school at Graham South Elementary school (torn down since I attended), to this very day.  It is interesting to look at them and read their walls, look at their pictures, posts and even look at who their friends are now.  Seems weird, sometimes I poke around on their profile page trying to piece their lives together from the last time I saw them until now.  It is not always easy though.

I wrote a blog sometime back about my life, I reader digest condensed version of my life so new FB friends could see what I have been up to.  It makes me wonder, is that what Facebook has done to us, removed the real relationships and created superficial, condensed versions of our previous relationships?  A friend of mine had a high school reunion recently and realized this as well, she wrote a blog about http://arathersimplerecipesaltlovelight.blogspot.com/2011/06/big-reunion.html

I am very careful about who stays on my friends list, if I were to create a bucket list at the top of that list would be to reconnect, in person and in a real way, with each of the folks I keep on my list in the ether world that is the internet.  I understand what FB is and have made friends that I feel connected with, I feel that way anyway - but who knows, I may just be one of 3,568 friends that they have, I might be lost in the noise of a busy wall.  Nothing can replace a real physical relationship, it can be augmented by social media but nothing beats a hug from a good friend and sitting around laughing together.    

Anyway, back to how it is interesting to see how we have all gotten to where we are today.  I like to think of it as the river of life, we get in, we ride along seeing the sights and enjoying (or enduring) the ride.  Back to the moments in time I talked about in the last blog.  We get in and as we float along life is happening, we better hold and realize that we cannot get back upstream.  We also need to understand the end of the river is the end and we better make the best of the ride and enjoy the scenery on the trip. 

I am going to stick with the river analogy here for a bit.  As I look at folks I see some who are riding along in different modes of transportation.  Some seem to have gotten in knowing the exact spot they were heading, fired up the powerful speed boat and set course for the destination.  They appeared to have a life plan from an early age, whether they did or not that was the perception I had of it.  That is not to say that once out of my sight the engine on that boat did not give them no end of trouble, but I did not see that.  Others hopped into a sailboat, still knowing where they were heading but maybe it was not as clearly defined but the life plan was in place.  Seems silly talking about it because it was my own narrow perspective that created that perception, funny how we do that huh? 

Others jumped on the raft, having never been on a river before – or those without an exact plan but were forced to jump in all the same.  Some of those on the rafts were also dealt the hand of no damn paddles and still others may have just gotten an old inner tube with a slow leak.  And then of course there are those who were traveling a proverbially polluted estuary without any manual means of transportation (up shit creek without a paddle for those who did not get that).  

Some of us get in and along the way we switch rides, maybe from the powerful motor boat to raft, or vice versa.  Some on the inner tubes may just bounce along the shoreline stopping when something looks interesting, something that would not have been noticed if one were racing by on a speed boat.  I guess my point is that the method is not important, both the speed boat and the tuber have great experiences and horrific challenges.  The boat may hit a sandbar that a tube could easily slip over top of and a rafter will be less concerned with the depth of the river bed than say a sailboat with a long daggerboard.

I find it crazy to imagine my friend from high school being a preacher, but I have no real idea what his trip down the river of life has been like, and he cannot understand my ride either.  When I got in the river I had no destination in mind, no place that I was trying to get to.  When I was younger I think that might just have been dim-wittedness but as I have gotten older I am rather happy that I started like that.  Bouncing along the shore line, into the good and bad and still continuing my ride.  I look at it like this, all those experiences have brought me to where I am, the good the bad and the ugly.  Each stop building on the last to create the man I am today.  Who knows if I was speeding down stream in speed boat I may have missed Bride there on her inner tube and left nothing behind but a woman screaming obscenities at a passing boat for going too fast and overturning her inner tube.

Along the way we accumulate partners who ride along with us, some stay longer than others and some are there for only a moment while we are stuck on the snarled roots of a mangrove tree.  Each having some contribution to who we are, even the ones who did not even realize they had an impact on us.   There have been so many on my ride I could not even begin to count them, some I never even liked but I still got some bit of wisdom from them that I put on my raft for use, maybe a figurative length of rope I used of when my tube came to the head of a waterfall to save myself.   I have enjoyed the ride so far, I am looking forward to going to church and listening to friend preach up a storm the next time I make it to Ohio.  I will probably smile remembering the two of us getting drunk at the girl-scout camp that used to be out at Kiser Lake.  The one thing I know - I am looking forward to taking a look at what his transportation and course have been since I saw him all those years ago. 

I have found the secret to life – on the cool side of a pillow

So the other day I was tossing and turning in bed, that is something that I do not normally have issues with.  After 10 years in the Navy I can pretty much sleep anywhere at any time thorough just about anything.  Anyway as I turned the pillow over to enjoy the cool side and I realized that there it was, right under my head for all these years – the secret to life.  I am sure everyone has experienced that fleeting feeling of the cool side of the pillow, I say fleeting because it starts to change almost instantaneously.  It moves from a feeling of crawling inside a warm hug from someone who loves you to just a warm pillow so quickly.  Since then then I have tried to determine how long that feeling lasts, if you get 20 seconds of joy out of the experience you can hold it longer than me, the feeling starts to fade the moment my head hits it but takes about 10 seconds before the sensation of wonderfulness is gone.  Another thing I noticed was the more I watched and harder I tried to hold on to the moment the less I enjoyed it and the shorter the joyous time was. 

I will come back to that so hold that thought.  A big event going on in my life right now is my best friend of over 20 years is going through radiation treatment.  He had a cancerous tonsil removed some time back and the prognosis for this treatment is great so I have not dwelled on the things we don’t talk about, not even to our best friends.  He started radiation treatments 3 weeks ago and has a 11 more treatments left to go.  The first weeks of treatment were once a day but he just started  two treatments a day.  Anyway, he has lost about 10-15 pounds and since the radiation is directed to neck he has been unable to swallow since the end of week one and is forced to drink 6 of those ensure drinks a day as food.  No solid food for over two weeks, he has never complained but that has to be a bitch.   

I have been spending more time hanging out with him lately, not that I can do anything but be there for him.  He has joined me on numerous occasions on my early morning excursions to the beach to watch the sunrise, this morning he even went for a swim.  It is kinda funny, I send a text when I leave my house, usually about 10 minutes to 5, and if he wants to go he will open his garage door and when I drive by I stop, or not depending on the position of that door.  I secretly hope that door is up each morning I drive by, I so enjoy just being there for him, to talk to, to be someone he can complain to and whatever else he needs to do or say.   As I am typing this I think I will go by tomorrow morning and I can only hope the door is up when I go by.  Seems like a silly thing, to build so much symbolism into the position of a garage door – thinking about that is making me smile though so silly or not I don’t care.   

I have stopped over to see him after work a number of times since his treatments have started.  Not that he would ever complain but it has been hard for me to listen to him describe each new malady as the treatments persist.  That sounds stupid saying as I read it – “hard for me to listen”, what kind of stupid shit is that to say?  It has been hard for him to endure and I am embarrassed that I might even think that listening to my best friend describe his issues would be hard for me – sorry brother.  I listened and try to understand as he described a sour taste and phlegmyness, then the sore throat and inability to swallow food. From there it went to that radiation sunburn on his neck and face to now his teeth are very sore and hurt and his saliva glands are slowing down production, which creates a whole new other set of maladies. 

I try hard not make our time together awkward for him, or for me.  Sometimes I get scared that I might say something or do something that will offend my friend or make him mad.  I keep it loose and never presume he needs assistance with anything, I have to believe he will ask if he needs something.  I can only imagine the reaction if I were to assume (and ask about helping with something specific) he needed help with something.  I suspect he might think he is losing more control of his situation – I know I would.  I am pretty sure my friend will read this so if you need something you need to tell me, I will do whatever you need without question – because you would do the same for me.      

I find that we laugh a lot though, the other day he was telling me that the plastic mask they use to strap him down to a board to hold everything in place while the treatment is underway was getting looser and more comfortable because he was losing weight.  We laughed about that, I told him he was an eternal optimist, able to find and appreciate the fact that the mask did not hurt as bad because the radiation treatments were making him lose weight.  We laughed and laughed, he is so strong in his approach to these treatments, what is going to happen is going to happen he says.  I quit drinking a long time ago but almost every time I stop by lately, mostly after work I share a beer with my great friend. On my last visit, due to the treatments, he could not swallow so he ended up pouring it out in the bushes.  I think that frustrated him to no end but I did not say anything although I did consider calling him a lightweight.  We also laughed about his nurses at the treatment center.  He told them before he was done with treatments that he wanted a picture taken.  One that shows him strapped into the treatment apparatus with each of the two nurses each holding whips.  I told him that has to be a day that I take you for the treatment because I want to take that picture!!   He wants to use that as his profile picture on Facebook – we laughed some more, I love that guy!    

So why did I run through that when I started about the cool side of a pillow and the meaning of life?  Well what I was reminded of is that ALL things in life are fleeting and will change soon enough.  You cannot hold on to moments in time, that cool side of the pillow quickly changes to the warm side.  I can’t predict the outcome of my friend’s treatments, but I can just spend time with my buddy, being present for him – whatever that means.

That cool side of the pillow is it, I got the meaning of life from it.  We have to work HARD to live in the moment, life is nothing but a series of moments – each of which we need to treasure.  Kind of like a series of snapshots in time, watching as the march of time pushes our snapshots across our life – there is no stopping it no matter what.  One moment we are looking at one snapshot and the next moment that one is gone and the next one presents itself.  That cool side of the pillow, it is fabulous and then it gets warm.  Instead of missing the coolness we need to stop and enjoy that snapshot of when it is cool and know that it, like all things in life are fleeting and ever changing.  The moments come and go and if we spend all of our time anticipating the next one or trying to hold onto the ones that have past we miss the ones that are present, right there in front of us.

I guess it could be equated to the phrase, stop and smell the roses but to me it so much more.  I want to be present for my buddy, to listen to whatever he wants to talk about.  The past is gone and the future is unknown, enjoy the conversation and laugh at the mental picture of him strapped in a radiation mask to a board while the nurses are holding whips.  Sorry buddy but if I get that picture it will be on facebook!

The one constant in life is that it will change and it will change no matter our efforts to hold onto it or to predict it.  No matter the circumstance, life is a hell of ride and if we spend our time bitching about standing in line of life while we wait to get on the ride we are missing the point.  Waiting in line is ride.  Stop and just be present, watch others or watch yourself, strike up a conversation with a friend, with a stranger, give some change to those less fortunate but whatever you do, don’t let the wait ruin your day because life is in that snapshot of time you spend waiting.