Gas Prices
May 13, 2008 by JanB
Every week, sometimes several times per week, the news headlines scream, “New Record Gas Prices!” or “New Record Oil Prices Per Barrel!“.
You know, we freaking get it all ready. We’ve all have minivans and the SUVs, we can’t get rid of them and we can’t afford to fill the tanks. It’s going to keep skyrocketing every single week until finally, as a nation, we do something about it to make lasting changes.
Touting this as a new record over and over simply rubs the salt into the wound. Let’s just say it’s spiraling out of control and we are shoulder deep in national inflation that our government refuses to acknowledge. Let’s be done with that.
It’s not just gas, it’s food and everything else that is through the roof. This week I shopped at Aldi, spent $220.00 and filled two carts to overflowing. The store is over an hour from my house and I wanted to be sure I only had to make that trip once. Shopping at the traditional store would have cost me more than double. I can’t control gas prices, but I can go to where they sell bread for $.89 a loaf and beef for a buck ninety nine. Heck, I can make that bread myself.
I find myself walking a lot more. Maybe this crunch is good for one thing, maybe it will help more of us get onto our feet. Maybe it will have people mowing their lawns with reel mowers that require some physical effort. Maybe this is what’s needed to get us healthy, but I think that it is going to hurt a lot. Jon has ballgames, some of which are thirty miles away. You know, I am not doing that next year. I am not committing to these long drives for extra-curricular activities. That’s how this affects us. We stay home or we walk.
I play a new game at home which I call, “How long can I stretch a tank of gas?”. What are you doing to beat inflation?
Besides crying? We are definitely working on stretching our gas tanks–we have little Saturns, so we are not feeling it like some people, but still, today’s $3.94 price sign (after filling up yesterday for $3.74) just made me shake my head in disgust and disbelief.
We’re also looking at cutting some non-essentials (Netflix, newspaper, landline), and we are looking at where we can bike! (living in suburbia, it’s not always the safest option)
We cut back on entertainment, netflix, that sort of stuff too. It’s a hard time right now, not going to get better in the immediate future either. Vote democrat. Seriously.