Nerdy Suburban Mom

He still needs a lot of help with sharp or hot things, but he loves helping in the kitchen!

Brett (and, apparently, now Lillian) gets really bad spring allergies, due mostly to the incredible quantities of pine pollen in South Carolina’s midlands. This is a picture of the driveway after a light sprinkling (5 minutes)…

When you rent a car, you have two choices: buy a tank of gas up-front at current average market prices, or pay a premium (usually almost twice average market price) for the fuel they need to refill the car with once it is returned.  The “game” to play when doing this is buy the full tank of gas up-front, then see just how empty you can get the car before returning it.

I hereby declare us to be the winners of that game.  We managed to run out of gas 0.2 miles from the rental agency, and had to push it in to return it completely empty of fuel.

Mind you, this is a very stupid game; if we had run out just 0.1 miles sooner, we would have been stuck on I-190 in heavy traffic. That’s 0.003 gallons of gas.  0.3% of a gallon.  That’s ridiculous, and it was a not-so-gentle hint that we probably shouldn’t play stupid games with gasoline levels with two small children in the car and a plane to catch. (Even at the intersection where the car died, we shouldn’t have been stopped; there was a PA system that kept saying, “Drivers please return to your vehicle.” I ignored it, because we had to push, and I figured the worst that would happen is the state police would show up and help us push.)

(All the same — we won, we won!)

This is a picture of Reuven (age 5 months) next to a photograph of Brett (age around 9 months).

Think they might be related? 🙂

Before going to the plant to see my friends, we stopped by Lillian’s old preschool/daycare to see all her friends. This was one of the best stops of the whole trip; Lilly really loved this place, and she loved Miss Marta (the morning teacher/caretaker) so much that she hasn’t been able to talk to her on the phone without crying. Amazingly, she decided to be a little shy when we first came in, despite everybody making a huge fuss over her; the natural craziness of toddlers in an enclosed area soon kicked in, though, and they were all running around like there hadn’t been a four month absence.

Daddy helped out when it came time to dance to some Disney music (aka, Mousercise!)…

After that, Lillian got to eat lunch with everybody before we went to the plant. I seriously miss this school, it’s tons better than her new one… one of those finds that you’ll never be able to duplicate.

I decided to try to track my non-gasoline-fueled transportation, and do a few calculations to see how much money (and gasoline!) I’ve saved.

Basically, I will only count trips that I would have had to make anyway, and typically would have uesd the car for. This includes trips to the grocery store (2.1 miles), picking up Lillian from daycare (5.8 miles), the library, the ice cream store, the good hamburger place, the good pizza place… lucky a lot of these are just over a mile from the house, which means I’m not saving a whole lot of gas, but it is an easy trip and therefore a much bigger incentive to bike instead of drive!

It also includes trips made by Brett borrowing my bike. Maybe he’ll get his own eventually — this would be particularly nice because then I can include trips like the burger place which currently he has to drive to while I bike… and therefore I can’t count it.

Anyway, here’s the page — just over a dollar saved so far. I think I will buy myself something nice once I “save” enough money up!

Check out a photo from around nine years ago.  Where the hell did Drew find this?  And what the hell is that thing on Brett’s chin?

Facebook didn’t have an option for “Married” when I first signed up, just “In a Relationship”. Since then, they’ve realized some of their users might be older and boring, I suppose, so I can now add my spouse.

But only if he’s willing to admit to my existence…