It's a Gas (The Coronavirus Diaries, Part XVII)
On January 10 I bought gas for my car right before Birdie arrived, on the assumption that having a full gas tank was one less thing to worry about when dealing with a new baby. That was six months ago today, and I still haven't refilled my gas tank. Even compared to my weird 2020, this is unprecedented territory.
This means I've filled my gas tank a total of four times since my last pre-pandemic tank on March 13, 2020, which was also my last day in the office. At my usual rate of about 350 miles per tank, I still have at least another 100 miles to go before I must fill it in again. I usually bought three tanks of gas per month pre-pandemic, so in 2021 alone that's seventeen tanks not purchased.
There were probably years of college when I lacked a car altogether when I might have bought more tanks of gas than I have since the start of the pandemic. That may seem strange, but I often borrowed wheels from my fraternity brothers (ok, usually Neal and occasionally Patrick) and basic car borrowing etiquette at my fraternity involved topping off the tank before returning it.
My employer decided to let the vast majority of my coworkers who had previously worked in an office choose whether or not they'd return. Since my role was not in the tiny minority of people who were required to come back, I opted to stay home for the foreseeable future. Because of that, I don't expect my gasoline usage to go up anytime soon. As a bonus, at some point I'll no longer have to pay income taxes to the suburb where the office is located, although there's currently an ongoing "state of emergency" that is preventing that change for the moment.
As far as other activities that might take us out of the house, we've often usually been driving M's car, which is averaging a tank a month or so this year. Since we'd only had her car two months before the pandemic started, it's unclear what her normal mileage would have been, but clearly it would have been more than a tank a month!
While thing are starting to open up again (notably, baseball and concerts and movies are all back to some extent), the whole "having a baby" thing puts a big damper on going out and doing activities anyway, so much so that M and I had a serious conversation about whether it really made sense for us to continue to own two cars. This was a particularly relevant conversation because the selling price for used cars has skyrocketed in the last few months due to supply chain issues, and I have several coworkers who unloaded used cars for 40% higher than blue book or more. If those numbers held, I could probably get $7500 or more for my 2010 Honda Civic, which is a pretty significant chunk of what I paid for it. The question, of course, was when would we need a second car? Since work could theoretically recall us into the office at any point (unlikely, but still) and the car was long ago paid off and isn't costing us very much in insurance or gas right now, M convinced me that this particularly idea would have been premature optimization.
I figure this just makes it more likely that I can drive it until I was fifty, by which point I expect there to be many electric cars on the market, and I won't need to worry about gas again. While all of my friends who own Tesla's love them, I personally have no need to be on the bleeding/leading edge of technology, so that works.
This means I've filled my gas tank a total of four times since my last pre-pandemic tank on March 13, 2020, which was also my last day in the office. At my usual rate of about 350 miles per tank, I still have at least another 100 miles to go before I must fill it in again. I usually bought three tanks of gas per month pre-pandemic, so in 2021 alone that's seventeen tanks not purchased.
There were probably years of college when I lacked a car altogether when I might have bought more tanks of gas than I have since the start of the pandemic. That may seem strange, but I often borrowed wheels from my fraternity brothers (ok, usually Neal and occasionally Patrick) and basic car borrowing etiquette at my fraternity involved topping off the tank before returning it.
My employer decided to let the vast majority of my coworkers who had previously worked in an office choose whether or not they'd return. Since my role was not in the tiny minority of people who were required to come back, I opted to stay home for the foreseeable future. Because of that, I don't expect my gasoline usage to go up anytime soon. As a bonus, at some point I'll no longer have to pay income taxes to the suburb where the office is located, although there's currently an ongoing "state of emergency" that is preventing that change for the moment.
As far as other activities that might take us out of the house, we've often usually been driving M's car, which is averaging a tank a month or so this year. Since we'd only had her car two months before the pandemic started, it's unclear what her normal mileage would have been, but clearly it would have been more than a tank a month!
While thing are starting to open up again (notably, baseball and concerts and movies are all back to some extent), the whole "having a baby" thing puts a big damper on going out and doing activities anyway, so much so that M and I had a serious conversation about whether it really made sense for us to continue to own two cars. This was a particularly relevant conversation because the selling price for used cars has skyrocketed in the last few months due to supply chain issues, and I have several coworkers who unloaded used cars for 40% higher than blue book or more. If those numbers held, I could probably get $7500 or more for my 2010 Honda Civic, which is a pretty significant chunk of what I paid for it. The question, of course, was when would we need a second car? Since work could theoretically recall us into the office at any point (unlikely, but still) and the car was long ago paid off and isn't costing us very much in insurance or gas right now, M convinced me that this particularly idea would have been premature optimization.
I figure this just makes it more likely that I can drive it until I was fifty, by which point I expect there to be many electric cars on the market, and I won't need to worry about gas again. While all of my friends who own Tesla's love them, I personally have no need to be on the bleeding/leading edge of technology, so that works.