1. My Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) supplier is raising its box price by $1, a 3% difference, owing to increased expenses.
2. The gas prices have increased 5.5% since last week.
I have brought my lunch every day this week. I also took the bus once. I will have at least eight hours of overtime this week. My commuting bus runs from Mo-Fr, so I scoot when possible on the weekends.
More lentils and garbanzos on the menu for next week. A good thing it is we have free water, juices, carbonated beverages and Starbucks at work. Maybe even, if energy allows, a I may engage in a batch cooking weekend, as my joyboy/sireling/coborrower is on call this week while I have my "death march" to May 8... must be cheaper than ordering pizza.
I wonder if I'm going to see middle-aged and middle-income white men in parking lots begging for gas money again, like I did last summer.
Tighten that belt another notch
May 4th, 2007 at 07:56 pm
May 4th, 2007 at 10:24 pm 1178317478
I guess I've gotten used to rising gas prices; it doesn't seem that shocking any more.
May 4th, 2007 at 11:29 pm 1178321383
May 5th, 2007 at 03:31 am 1178335874
I should get used to the gas increases -- they're not going away. But I'm feeling even a twinge of guilt for using my 55mpg scooter as often as I do.
May 5th, 2007 at 05:28 am 1178342924
May 5th, 2007 at 01:43 pm 1178372612
That's scary and ominous to me. Yesterday the driver of our HOV=3 vehicle commented on the mailing list that there seemed to be fewer passengers wanting rides across the traffic-thick freeway westbound. Maybe it's summer and people like me want to ride their motorcycles, bicycles and scooters. Maybe, with 68,390 millionaires in King County, they're not concerned about 9% inflation or peak oil. Or they're driving Priuses and Elements, and are okay with staying in traffic for forty more minutes as long as they're in a new car.
But yeah, "the sheep used to getting sheared" metaphor can apply to other things too, like credit cards. "Who cares that our grace period went from 25 to 20 days? It's a tool! Who cares that they eliminated the caps on balance transfers so we make less money borrowing to invest in CDs and other things? It's a tool! Who cares that some silly mistake made by a creditor falsely caused a late payment and our universal default clause in the agreement jacked our rates up to 24.9%, and they're not going down even though we spent five hours petitioning the other creditor to remove the spot from our report? Credit cards are tools!"
Who cares that stealth inflation has raised prices by 8 or 9% annually since 2003, and that a decently diversified portfolio has returned only 6% since 2001? Who cares about the AMT affecting middle-class households? Who cares about honeybees disappearing and possibly affecting the food supply?
May 10th, 2007 at 05:13 am 1178774028
May 11th, 2007 at 02:15 pm 1178892945
I'm idealistic in that I think there should be something the individual can do. People ate out less and had gardens when inflation was high in the 1970s. The individual can stop using cards from banks that continue to change terms and agreements to be increasingly anti-consumer. An individual can put flora in her garden to attract and retain bees.
Where I'd like my brain retrained is to have the mortgage paid off by age 45. I'd like to think we've done a decent job, even in the slo-mo market rise over the past seven years, catching up with our retirement savings -- we just passed the $200,000 mark. Now I want to catch up to the Europeans with the mortgage scenario. All the while I shall be shaking my fist at the Federal Reserve, the hedge fund managers, the speculators, and the spending-like-drunk-sailors administration, yelling "You won't get the best of me! I am unsinkable!"