Zone pricing... we have a single zone for a couple hundred rural square miles on the north coast of California. We routinely best the traditionally reported highest prices in the country (San Francisco and Hawaii). Today we have $4.79, down from $5.19 a few weeks ago. All of the stations use the same supplier. When a Costco opened up and trucked in its own gas, prices fell everywhere 10 cents overnight and Costco was still 25 cents cheaper.

I write Thingamababy.com.
http://www.thingamababy.com/

It's a dad's eye view of baby and toddler stuff. Not too much of it qualifies as neat for non-parents, but my "Unusual" category might be interesting for some.

Neatorama's What is it? game inspired me to do a few What Was the Inventor Thinking? games covering obscure patents for parenting inventions.
http://www.thingamababy.com/baby/2008/05/contest.html

It's a Roly Poly trap! Pill bugs, potato bugs and doodle bugs crawl over the oval rim at the bottom and flip on their backs. A den of spiders live hidden in Roly Poly-styled alcove above and simply swoop down to grab dinner.

This was a mail-order observation science toy when I was a kid. The spiders always arrived dead in the package and you had to collect new ones from around your home. The new ones never stayed put and you'd wake up at night with them crawling on you.

"Fun" is the word to describe parenting. People will tell you it gets harder the older your kids get, but it gets better, more fun, and more enriching as your labor pays off with the formation of a great human being.

There are negative feelings too, but it comes back to what type of personality you have. A parent should be able to look at a child who is screaming over the silliest thing and giggle inside. These "negative" moments are about handling one's responsibility, not getting emotionally caught up in the moment like a child.

Fifty years from now I'll wish I could travel back in time to enjoy something as simple as my kid crying over my cutting his peanut butter and jelly sandwich the wrong way. People who know how to brush off stress should be parents.

Parenting is like having a second job, far tougher than your salaried job. The joy and pride that comes with it are much stronger than anything I've felt at any other time in my life.

The issue is how much a parent wanted to have children and what his expectations are once he has them. If it was an auto-pilot decision -- get job, buy house, get married, have kids -- because that's the societal blueprint, then yeah, you're going to be unhappy. The worst situations are when parents try to keep living the lives they had before they became parents -- the kids always lose.

It's an either/or proposition. Either you are excited by parenting and dive in prepared for both emotional extremes (it's a roller coaster), or you're generally going to have a lot of unhappiness in your life.

I gave my then-2-year-old two semi-broken digital cameras obtained from Freecycle. Now at age 4, I'm planning to buy her a real camera. I'd love to hear about how your 2-year-old handles your old camera, specifically what design aspects work and which ones present challenges. I wrote some old observations here:

http://www.thingamababy.com/baby/2006/06/digital_photogr.html

It's a personal pleasure device for the ladies. The dials measure thrust, pressure and tensile strength. You really don't want to know why there's a loop on the end.

Yep, independent owners make their profit off snack foods, or they go out of business and get replaced by a station owned by the oil company. In my area, there are very few independent stations.

So in debating whether or not to feel sorry, you need to know who the owner is of a particular station. You can't tell by the name brand.

You speedy speedsters crack me up. 300bps shoots text out at a perfect reading pace. Why would you need anything faster?

I pay $4.59 in northern California, but sadly, that's what all the stations in town charge.

It's for manual extraction of walrus tusks. They call it the Googoogajoob.

It's a handheld paper holder. Stick a sheet of paper under the clip and now it's portable.

It's not the depth that counts. It's how you spelunk it.

You have found one of my grandmother's peanut brittle cutters. Her brittle was anything but. This cutter helped score sheets of her igneous confections for cracking and could be turned on its side as a smashing implement when mood required.

It's a hand-held roller for making joints (seams) in pervious pavement (e.g., concrete sidewalks) and the like. You would think there would be a more complex tool to assure straight lines, but the folks who wield these tools are pros.