i love my wife. i love my daughter. i love my family. i love my friends. i love my family’s friends. and my wife’s and my daughter’s friends. all of you really. mad love. call me huggy hagen, i could give a damn. i’m glad you’re here.

One more thing about the Portland trip. Gas prices. We are being gouged here in Bend, my friends.

Here’s the deal. On Wednesday evening, (9/7), I went to a Chevron near my house to fuel up my car for the trip to Portland. I paid $3.12/gallon for 87-octane Regular Unleaded. This was not the cheapest nor the most expensive brand-name* gasoline in town. The same day at another Chevron on the north end of town, I saw 87-octane for $3.19/gallon.

Anyway, we start our trip on Thursday. Gas prices had not changed significantly. The first place I noticed a price discrepancy was near Timberline Lodge. That remote little Chevron south of the pass (and this camera) had 87-octane for $3.02. This is usually an expensive gas stop, due to its location. I made a comment about it, and continued on into the city.

Once we were in Portland, I was shocked to see gas in the $2.75-$2.85/gallon range. When we left on Saturday morning, I filled up at $2.74/gal. Bend’s price when we returned was still upwards of $3.10.

So what’s up with that? We don’t get gasoline from the Gulf Coast. Our supply didn’t change. Why is there so much fucking greed here in Bend?

*I can tear your engine apart and tell if you’ve been burning shitty gas.

the iPod mini is gone. Not that I miss it. I never thought it was particularly cool looking, at least not compared to a 3g or 4g full-size model. The pastel colors and all - no.

Anyway, its replacement, launched this week, ditched the hard drive and went to flash. It’s little, and just about exactly what the iPod Shuffle wanted to be. Plus, they finally made an iPod available in black. (Don’t even start, that U2 piece of shit didn’t count.)

It’s a cool looking little machine, but it doesn’t have enough storage. The 4GB model (there is also a 2GB) costs a whopping $249. The 20GB full sized version is only $299. That’s quite a few more songs. I know well that 4GB is not enough for a hardcore iPodder; my trusty 3g 10GB version is painfully small these days. Also, it says on the Apple site that you need “a Mac with built-in USB 2.0″ - built-in USB 2? I wonder if it really won’t work with an add-on card. That would make it a ton more expensive for me. My guess is that they skipped FireWire due to the size of the connector. It’s also small and light enough to go right into the washing machine in a pocket.

I spent the last couple of days in Portland on a press check. It was a new experience for me, as I had never done a press check on a catalog before. The press check is the process where you make sure that all the colors and content are correct, the paper is correct, and everything is going to work as it should when they print the 50,000 or so copies of the 24 page catalog. I was fortunate enough to be working with a very professional and helpful printing agency that helped me make sure the brochure/ catalog would be spot on and delivered on time.

I got to take my wife and daughter with me, and the print shop even has a loft in the building next to theirs and they put us up in it. It was quite swank, at The Avenue Lofts in the Pearl District. Quite a nice building. We stayed in a unit with no bedroom, so it’s just a flat with a bathroom, but really quite nice. Pretty much as big as our house if you take off the master bed and bath. It was fun to act like we were living large.

Portland is a nice place, and staying down in the Pearl was an interesting new perspective on it. Our room look directly out on I-405, and you could see Glisan and Everett where they crossed 16th. Open the windows, and the din of the freeway was overwhelming. But with the windows closed, it was very nice and comfortable. The city is strange like that, with opulence and poverty intertwined in places like the Pearl.

Oh yeah, my car got towed on Thursday. That was an adventure. There was someone parked in my spot in the underground garage, and since time is money in the printing biz, especially when your piece is being run on a mega-dollar Komori Lithrone 40 6-color press, I parked in the space next to it with the intention of moving it as soon as I could. I checked the garage about 8 times that day, and the damn Audi was in my spot each time. Until my second to last press check at 9:30pm. I went down, and there was a Mercedes C class in the spot where my car was, and both my car and the Audi were gone. Luckily, my printing rep picked up the tab, which was $200, even though the car was in a lot only 7 blocks down the street. Weak. Those towing dudes must make a fortune. Not the drivers, but the richies in their West Hills houses who collect the checks.

Hmm, what else…

Oh yes, the TV. There was a big 42 inch widescreen, not a flat panel, but one of those projection jobs, by Hitachi, in the loft. For such an expensive and large TV, it sucked ass. Firstly, it was set up to stretch the 4:3 standard TV signal into 16:9, which not suprisingly, looks like shit. Plus, with the upsampling that these hi-res TVs do, it wrecks the quality of almost any picture. I am imagining that DVDs would have looked nice, but I didn’t have any to watch. Bottom line, once I changed the aspect ratio to 4:3, to put bars vertically on the sides of the image, and turned off the upsampling, the picture was still nowhere near as nice as it is on my 27″ Sony Wega CRT. Obviously, we’re not really there with the widescreen HD technology yet, especially considering the price.

I guess that seems to be plenty of yammering for now.

What a train wreck. I have spent the last week immersed in the tragedy/travesty that is Hurricane Katrina and the bungled recovery/rescue efforts. What a mess. It is a good reminder how insignificant most of our troubles really are.

My biggest question about the whole thing is as follows:

Okay, we knew this was a motherfucker of a storm. In fact, it was predicted to be WORSE when it made landfall. If that was the case, where the fuck were the buses and transport aircraft and such to evacuate people before the storm hit? There were several hours that the news channels were tracking the storm, outlining its severity, et cetera, and so why didn’t we do anything then?

I know that now, the biggest complaints are how the post-storm recovery efforts are being handled. But I think that overlooks what could have been our best defense against catastrophe - foresight. I mean shit - the President is “Mr. Preemptive Strike,” right? So what the fuck were we doing in the hours before?

I know complacency is an issue….people have a hard time believing anything is going to happen directly to them until it does, and this is an area that has been told to evacuate in the past because of impending storms that barely made a mark.

I know, I know, I don’t have any answers….just a lot of questions that no one has a real answer for.