My Little Soapbox

I’m talking about petrol…fuel….gas. That go-juice that gets me to and fro. You see this topic has been on my mind greatly this past few weeks. Mostly because Mr. Numbers and I had a conversation that went something like this:

Mr. Number: Gas costs $3 dollars a gallon expected to be $4 by summer

Me: No kidding!! I just filled the van for $55 yesterday.

Hubby: Yeah I’m filling the truck almost every five days now (me mentally $75 per tank - hoo sheesh that’s where the money goes)

Us: Maybe we should start watching our gas costs more.

So we set a goal that we would diligently try to make a tank (or #280 miles) go two weeks in the van. Which puts my “travel budget” at about $100 or so per month. Which sounds like a lot right? Until you figure out that that’s really only about TWO tanks of gas. TWO. That’s it!

At $3.09/gallon which is what I paid on Saturday I got 18 gallons of gas which equated to $55.62. And hopefully…HOPEFULLY that will get me at least to next week. But the caveat is that to make this whole budget the gas/miles thing work:Every mile I drive has to count. And trips have to be condensed, limit or really fruitful.

So I filled up Saturday March 15th and I re-filled last night March 27th really do late in the day that’d I’ll consider it the 28th. We didn’t do to bad considering we had two extra West Des Moines trips this last two weeks. So all in all it wasn’t to bad from a usage standpoint. But this is going to take sometime to get used to condensing trips and redefining what “into town” means.