hello down there

We put up a bunch of lights today. Yay! I got the two old strands of poofy lights working again - these are the ones we stopped putting up at the old house because people kept vandalising them ;_; - and got those up, and we lit up a small tree that's planted in our front yard with light nets, and put up a little strand of icicle lights around the front door. There's more I think we'll do, but it's a good start.

Almost all the snow has melted out of the yard, now, so if we get more snow any time soon, it'll be yet another event. But the forecast doesn't make that sound likely, which is fair enough by me right now; one thing that we've discovered (or rediscovered, since we noticed it last year but it wasn't really an issue) is that the wooden front steps get really fucking slick in cold weather - much more so than the stone steps, the concrete stairs, the driveway, etc. I think that we've found another bad-design feature of the house, and we need to find a way to fix it so that we don't bounce down the hill to our deaths when it's icy out.

Yesterday, I finished a draft of my statement of purpose; I've gotten some important feedback about it, so I'll rewrite it tomorrow and at that point should be just about done. So, um, yeek? Something like that. And on Friday, we went over to kathrynt's house to visit rmd and claudia_, since they were in town for a few days, and that was fun.

I have boatloads of photos to process for posting. But that includes a surprise end-of-year leaf picture that I took just yesterday. I didn't think I'd get any more leaf pictures this year. Maybe I'll use one of those for a solstice card this year, since I haven't drawn anything relevant and I'm almost out of time. (I'm sad about that. ;_; )

But for now, anyway, here; have a reminder of a warmer season:


Yellow Borders

That was taken in late September, I think. This is all the now-famous Road to the Shops, a.k.a. Goat Trail Road. And a spot on that same road - taken on the same walk, I think - at the head of a small and very twisty private road down the side of the hill towards some houses:


We're Down Here

Next set of photos will include a mushroom. I almost put it in tonight's entry, but am holding back. I'm still tempted, but I'll leave it for now. I've actually been seeing a fair number of mushrooms, but I didn't catch them for some reason until after that hard freeze, and none of them make for very nice photographs at that point. :-p

Friday's token: 0.1
Saturday's miles: 2.4
Miles out of Hobbiton: 531
Miles out of Rivendell: 71.2
Miles to Lothlórien: 395.2

( Alternate take )

( Quizfest )

Unless I've completely misunderstood something rather significant, the releases from the American Strategic Reserve and the extra shipments from OPEC were both largely out of the system by the end of November. The extra shipments of both crude and processed fuels - at 2MB/day - from the European strategic oil reserves have also expired, though tankers are still arriving.

While all of those SR releases were in effect, crude and refined product inventories climbed week-by-week. As of last week, however, the picture may have begun to change; conditions at refineries had recovered enough that they American refiners were running at close to 90% of capacity, and while refined-products inventories continued to climb, crude inventories fell, their first fall since those emergency shipments started hitting American shores in late September and early October. It is important to note again that this is with European reserve releases still arriving.

Refined-products inventories rose less than crude inventories fell, which could indicate consumption ahead of current refining capacity, but the gap wasn't big enough to support that conclusion; crude inventory estimates are inexact for various reasons, and the mixed nature of the European releases makes guessing foolhardy. However, while refining capacity may and may not currently exceed market demand for refined products (and likely does not), it appears that it may again be ahead of crude oil supply flow. This seems unlikely, at first glance; at least, I certainly hope that isn't the case, because that would indicate a far more significant shift in crude oil supply levels than the markets have recognised.

Regardless, crude oil didn't get quite down to the $55/barrel I'd expected - much less the $50 I thought it could hit if the market panic-sold - but it got very close, and that fall has been paralleled by the kind of resurgent demand you would expect¹. Crude prices have, accordingly, begun to rebound. If I were me - and I am -_^ - I'd continue to watch inventory reports closely over the next few weeks.

American refinery capacity appears to be on track to be back up to near-normal by sometime in January 2006. Holiday travel may do interesting things to gasoline stocks by then if the weather is not unduly stormy. Cold weather, if it's a hard winter, will do interesting things to heating oil stocks; much has been said about availability of supply, but relatively little has been said about price, outside of the context of Hugo Chavez's little political maneuver in the northeast. Accordingly, it is worth nothing that heating oil/diesel prices have not been falling in a way comparable to the precipitous decline in gasoline, though there has been a small decline from peak.

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¹: Note that GM's downsizing plans are geared at mostly preserving their SUV-producing capacity; it's where they have done best the last few years. If those of us concerned with sharply limited rates of increase in oil supply vs. rising demand related to continued economic growth - what I've referred to previously as Phase One - are right, this could be the kind of disastrous decision that kills General Motors outright within a decade. They are gambling on the events of the last year and a half being an anomaly, and the events of the last few months indicating a return to normality. Perhaps they are right. However, they have not had a good track record as of late.