brinshannara (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
brinshannara) wrote2005-08-31 04:21 pm
brinshannara) wrote2005-08-31 04:21 pm
Entry tags:
Weather, gas, guilt, New Orleans and work.
It's been raining here since 1am, when the remnants of Katrina started coming through Montreal. I wound up staying up 'till 4 (not purposefully -- I couldn't sleep) and finally fell asleep to the sound of the steady rain outside my window. I woke up freezing my ass off, because all my windows in my apartment were wide open, and there were some cold-ass winds coming in. Stupid hurricane. (Yes, I am being silly, complaining about cold and wind and rain when New Orleans is, you know, 20 feet under water.)
Everyone's talking about the price of gas, too. The other week, up here, it was the equivalent of $3.71 US a gallon. We pay in Canadian dollars per litre. There are 3.78 litres in a gallon, and we were paying a $1.14 CAD a litre. i have no idea what that's jumped to now, but I am excessively happy that I don't own a car. Until this year, anytime I went somewhere, it was by bus, metro, taxi, or getting a lift from someone. Or walking. And I didn't feel like I was, environmentally speaking, a bad person, because I was always at least commuting with one other person.
Now that I have my license, I have guilt. I've used my mom's car a ton this summer, and I've driven myself places that I wouldn't have gone, without the car, or would have been able to take public transportation to, but it was just easier to use the car. Granted, I feel less guilty for having driven the Saturn sedan around than the Nissan Pathfinder. At least my mom's car has good gas mileage. $20 of gas, even at the $1.14 level, bought me more than a quarter of a tank, and I used just that "more than" a quarter of the tank over the course of that weekend, despite a fair bit of driving around. (This is the weekend I nearly got killed by the asshole in the blue minivan who ran a red light at 6:30am.)
I know that, in the grand scheme of things, my use of my mother's car is not a big deal. Since I got my license in March, I'd say that I've gone through a total of maybe three tanks of gas, max. And considering I've been on the planet for 28 years, being the one responsible for using three tanks of gas is not bad at all.
But given my 27 years of public transportation/carpooling exclusivity, it's hard to shake the guilt, particularly these days with rising oil prices, warnings about the oil supply running out... You know it's bad when Bush has opened up the US federal petroleum reserve. It's like I'm thinking that it's great timing -- I finally get my license, right when it's BAD to be reliant on gas/oil/etc.
That said... how is it possible, in this day and age, for a city like New Orleans to be so completely torn asunder that they're evacuating the ENTIRE CITY and thinking of ABANDONING it? Dude. It blows the mind.
And now, I am going to be late for work. Including tonight, only five more shifts. That doesn't make it that much easier to actually go in, though.
Everyone's talking about the price of gas, too. The other week, up here, it was the equivalent of $3.71 US a gallon. We pay in Canadian dollars per litre. There are 3.78 litres in a gallon, and we were paying a $1.14 CAD a litre. i have no idea what that's jumped to now, but I am excessively happy that I don't own a car. Until this year, anytime I went somewhere, it was by bus, metro, taxi, or getting a lift from someone. Or walking. And I didn't feel like I was, environmentally speaking, a bad person, because I was always at least commuting with one other person.
Now that I have my license, I have guilt. I've used my mom's car a ton this summer, and I've driven myself places that I wouldn't have gone, without the car, or would have been able to take public transportation to, but it was just easier to use the car. Granted, I feel less guilty for having driven the Saturn sedan around than the Nissan Pathfinder. At least my mom's car has good gas mileage. $20 of gas, even at the $1.14 level, bought me more than a quarter of a tank, and I used just that "more than" a quarter of the tank over the course of that weekend, despite a fair bit of driving around. (This is the weekend I nearly got killed by the asshole in the blue minivan who ran a red light at 6:30am.)
I know that, in the grand scheme of things, my use of my mother's car is not a big deal. Since I got my license in March, I'd say that I've gone through a total of maybe three tanks of gas, max. And considering I've been on the planet for 28 years, being the one responsible for using three tanks of gas is not bad at all.
But given my 27 years of public transportation/carpooling exclusivity, it's hard to shake the guilt, particularly these days with rising oil prices, warnings about the oil supply running out... You know it's bad when Bush has opened up the US federal petroleum reserve. It's like I'm thinking that it's great timing -- I finally get my license, right when it's BAD to be reliant on gas/oil/etc.
That said... how is it possible, in this day and age, for a city like New Orleans to be so completely torn asunder that they're evacuating the ENTIRE CITY and thinking of ABANDONING it? Dude. It blows the mind.
And now, I am going to be late for work. Including tonight, only five more shifts. That doesn't make it that much easier to actually go in, though.
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