02FA7: Daily Dearth

The main thing on everyone's minds this week is rising fuel prices because of the highly specific military action war in Iran. We had refueled all the house vehicles over the weekend and topped up Tobie's car one more time last night since we had been active. Gasoline/fuel prices are always tricky since there's no alternative to it, so we're all inevitably going to have to bite the bullet and pay higher prices. We can try to minimize how often we use the car and such, but eventually we'll need to get more gas.

And when gas prices go up, all prices tend to go up. So things are going to really sucky while the conflict continues. Tobie and I have been discussing how we can minimize using the car, which will impact our recreational activities. It'll mean gambling on home service massages options instead of driving out to our regular spas in the area, and making sure we walk to the Sunday Kadiwa market and all these little things. Maybe we'll even try walking out of the village for nearby errands, but probably not under the full morning sun as much as possible.

The non-negotiables driving things remain to be grocery runs, our one big monthly game night, and, of course, O Bar nights. We'll just have to see how bad things get, though. If gas prices reach ridiculous levels, we may not even be able to keep up with even these limited activities. Probably not the best time to live all the way in the South, away from most of the action. We already work from home, so taking away our social activities would be even more maddening - like an economically enforced quarantine order for all of us.

Oh, and the special cherry on top is that the water situation hasn't been ideal lately. We're back to near-daily water outages that tend to come with little or no notice. We're able to refill the water tank daily since the water is still active in the wee hours of the morning, but it does add a bit of stress to our daily routines.

What is happening to the world, eh?