Times are tough, even if you’re one of the world’s largest oil companies! Defending high gas prices at the pump for the past month – up to $2.15 a gallon here in Milwaukee – Exxon CEO Lee Raymond had this to say according to Forbes:

Raymond said he wanted to remind consumers the two biggest factors in the price of gasoline at the pump were crude oil prices and taxes. He estimated the company’s profit was around five cents a gallon.

Man, how can a multi-billion dollar mega-corp even get by on a nearly non existant 5 cent profit per gallon sold?

Well, I did some checking to see just how dire a situation it was for poor Exxon. The best I can tell (this stuff is near impossible to find by the way) each day there are about 8,500,000 barrels of gasoline produced in the US according to the Department of Energy, most of that I assume is consumed (another reason they give for high prices, HIGH DEMAND!).

Now, to be fair, that’s not all Exxon gasoline, but even Exxon says they’re the #1 fuel refiner in the world, so lets say on the low end that 50% of those 8,500,000 barrels of gasoline a day are Exxon barrels. So we have 4,250,000 barrels a day with 40 gallons per barrel….comes out to 170,000,000 gallons of gasoline sold every day by Exxon.

So, as Mr. Raymond said, they only make a tiny 5 cent profit on each of the 170,000,000 gallons of gas they’re selling. That comes out to 8,500,000 US Dollars, which isn’t a whole lot of money.. Untill you consider they’re profiting nearly nine million dollars every day. An average of nine million a day, every day of the course of a year bags them 3.2 Billion dollars per year.

And that’s just in gasoline.

Yes indeed, you can now see why Mr. Raymond feels the need to defend his company.. You can’t really buy anything these days for a nickel, so why should consumers make a big fuss?

Of course, some of the numbers I’m using above could be off, but they would have to be way off for Exxon not to be profiting hand over fist from it’s gasoline sales these days. Profiting to the tune of $21 Billion dollars in 2003 alone. Yes, I think we can all feel for Mr. Raymond and his companies razor thin profit margin.

Jenny and I need help figuring out what kind of plants we have in our backyard because it’s time to seperate the weeds from wallflowers!

We’re putting out the call for help and seeing if anyone can help us identify some of the plants shown here: http://five2one.org/media/gallery/garden_mystery.

We think we’ve got some of them figured out, but any help is appreciated!

I’ve mentioned it before, but my youngest brother Jon has been serving in the Marines for the past three years, mostly on the DMZ in South Korea.

Jenny sent me an email yesterday to a link from a CNN article mentioning that the 2nd Brigade of the 2nd Infantry division that was stationed in South Korea had gotten orders to be shifted to Iraq. He’d recently been promoted to Captain so we weren’t sure if that was his brigade or not, and naturally were pretty concerned.

Thankfully as a result of his recent promotion, he is back in the states for ‘Captain College’ as he refered to it, and for the next 6 months at least is not attached to his old division and brigade. Still, I emailed him to make sure they wouldn’t pull him back or anything and got this response:

That WAS my division. Good thing I left, huh?
Actually, I just talked to one of my friends there and the first they heard of it was when someone turned on CNN. Chances are it will be my old Brigade going.

So we’re pretty relieved that he won’t be going to Iraq anytime soon and hopefully not at all. But it is pretty scary and hits pretty close to home to say the least. As grateful as we are, I feel terrible for the people in Jon’s old brigade finding out about their redeployment on the news of all places.

Even though it’s been nearly nine months since me and Jennys wedding last July, I’m very pleased to announce that all 584 of our wedding pictures are scanned, edited, and posted on the website!

So, if you’re interested go have a look at our wedding pictures, and if you’ve seen the first few pages already (those were from pictures other people took and scanned) skip ahead to page 4 or so (out of 22!!) to see the new ones. I know it seems like it shouldn’t take that long to scan and post some pictures, but I never realized even the act of scanning 500+ pictures is an extremelly tedious task…

…And that’s with an auto-feed scanner! At any rate, enjoy and try to find Waldo!

I’ve just completed the move for the Windows Webserver Hall of Shame to a more easily managed weblog system based on Movable Type. In the four years I’ve been doing the WWHOS, it’s just been a static web page and it’s getting to be harder and harder to add to it because of that. Making it another ‘blog’ should mean more updates!

On a side note, it’s ironic I moved it to Movable Type considering the licensing restricions for their 3.0 product. Looks like I’ll be sticking with the 2.6 version for now!

Today is National Teacher Day! Seek out a teacher you know and send them an email saying you appreciate all the hard work they do!