My back is bothering me the past few days, which I assume is due to stress at school. The closer we get to the upcoming AP tests, the more stressful school gets, a situation which is aggravated by the unreliable copier at school which I am using constantly for my classes right now. I will be very happy when the AP tests are over and I can return to normal teaching again.

Gas prices have gone sky-high again, and there have been reported shortages in some places since the government has mandated using ethanol additives in all gasoline, but there is not sufficient ethanol available yet. I am neither anxious to pay over $3.00 a gallon as we did last summer after Hurricane Katrina, nor to wait in long gas lines like we did in the 1970s. This country’s energy gluttony is totally out of control, but we have done absolutely nothing to deal with it for a variety of reasons, including selfishness of the populace, and the federal government’s ties to the big oil industry. There was an article in the paper yesterday in which a scientist stated that global warming is so bad that Earth is headed for another mass extinction caused by humans, which I do not doubt one bit. The worsening weather the past few years is indicative of that, and I keep waiting for a wake-up call which will motivate both the federal government and the population to take the situation seriously, but that does not seem to be happening. I fear that as went the dinosaurs, so will go humans.