six weeks to the gallon

[cellio]

I had an ophthalmologist appointment this morning -- previous one got cancelled because the pandemic was in full bloom then, so I was well overdue. (Everything is as expected, fortunately.) When I went out to the car I opened the glovebox to deposit a new insurance card and, out of curiosity, checked my logbook.¹

I last got gas in early March.

I do drive the car around the neighborhood every now and then; I've been told this is important for the brake rotors, which depend on regular friction to keep, I dunno, barnacles or something from building up. But I haven't really gone anywhere. My doctor's office is about seven miles from home, so by recent standards this was an expedition.

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¹ Yes, I keep a paper log for my car -- have since I bought my first car, having learned the habit from my father.²

² Having recently learned how to do footnotes in CommonMark, a flavor of Markdown I had not previously used, I instinctively tried it here. Nope. I don't know what Markdown flavor Dreamwidth uses, but here I need to use <sup> tags to do that.

Comments

[madfilkentist]

That's impressive. I've been buying gas about once a month. However, the last time I got money from an ATM was in March. Since the pandemic got going, I've been using credit cards for everything rather than handle cash. I think there was one time I forgot my credit card and gave a $20 bill to a gas station attendant — and I drove away without coming back inside for change.

[hudebnik]

I don't maintain a log book, just a bucket full of gas receipts that I occasionally transfer en masse into Quicken, but I'm quite confident that I last filled the tank in early March. And the tank is about 3/4 full now. In the last five months I've driven around the block a few times, to Home Depot once, and (major expedition) 30 miles round-trip to the thrift store to donate a few garbage-bags of clothes.

Ordinarily I would be taking public transit to work almost every weekday, and shalmestere would be taking the car to work (since transit takes about 4x as long to get to her workplace as driving does), but neither of us has been to the respective office since March.

The last time I was at my office -- or took public transit -- wasn't even to do any work-for-hire: in early March we had mail-ordered a contrabass recorder to be delivered to the office because leaving it at their staffed, climate-controlled mailroom seemed preferable to leaving it on the front steps of our house. So I took the train in, walked through darkened halls to the minimally-staffed mailroom, claimed a box slightly smaller than myself, and took it home on the train.

[cellio]

My last ATM visit was sometime before all this started, too. Everything that can go on plastic that stays in my hand does so.

[cellio]

I'm not dedicated enough to enter all my purchases in Quicken. I don't record purchase prices in my log, just date, mileage, and how much gas I put in. Also oil changes and other maintenance (date, mileage). The questions I usually want to answer are "when did I last...?" and "is my mileage (weather-adjusted) consistent?".

We've been working from home since March too. I've made two brief (Sunday) visits to the office for equipment -- once to get a better chair and once to replace a failing keyboard.

Bringing the contrabass home on the train must have been fun. It probably helped you maintain distance from other passengers, at least. :-)