Grab the wheel

2006-06-04 - 9:08 p.m.

I often do my grocery shopping at Safeway. If I spend over $50 there at one time they give me a discount on gas. The problem with this is that none of the Safeway stores near me actually sell gas, so I never use my discount. The last time I went shopping there the girl at the checkout stand told me I'd accumulated six of these discounts. In the Safeway ad that came in the mail today they actually had a list of all the stores that sell gas, so I decided to go. The nearest one is in West Seattle, about eight and a half miles away. It seemed like a long way. When I got home, I decided to calculate just how much money I had saved by going there instead of my usual cheapie station up in Greenwood. I payed $3.05 in West Seattle versus the $3.09 I'd seen advertised in Greenwood this morning. Buying ten gallons I saved forty cents. Assuming my car gets thirty miles to the gallon, it actually cost me $1.72 to go round trip to West Seattle at $3.05 per gallon. It's 6.4 miles to my cheapie Greenwood station, costing me $1.32 to go round trip there at $3.09 per gallon. It cost me forty cents more to drive to West Seattle where I saved forty cents. I complete wash! Not to mention the fact that Lolo lives in Greenwood so I'm often there anyway where as I have absolutely no reason to ever go to West Seattle. Ah well, it was a break from my usual routine anyway.

Tonight my volleyball team played in our league's semi-finals. We're seeded first going into it so we had a bye the first game. We played the winner of the first game and we actually won! This means we're in the finals next week. Pretty cool, eh? In a way, though, I wish we weren't. If we had lost this week then we would have had next week off and I don't have to work next weekend. Maybe the weather would actually clear up enough for us to go out and do something.

Speaking of my car and bad weather, this morning as I was driving to work from Lolo's place a scary thing happened. I was going 70 on the freeway and it was wet but not actively raining at the moment. I know I should've slowed down in the wet, but I didn't. Anyway, I was driving along straight and steady when suddenly I felt my tires completely lose traction with the ground. My spedometer shot up to 90mph because my wheels were just spinning despite the fact that I was actually slowing down. It was a very freaky sensation to have absolutely no control. The whole thing lasted maybe a second before my tires grabbed ahold of the pavement again--I didn't really even have time to react before it was over. Yikes, though, I need to be careful. Plus I need new tires. I had noticed last Monday that my tires are getting a bit bald. Now I'm definitely getting them replaced on Wednesday, my next day off.