The experiment will continue

But not this week.

We've begun our three-week stint of kid-free life. Since Craig is working (indefinitely) at the Corporation, neither of us has a need to drive to work. With two fewer mouths to feed, we have fewer grocery needs.

This week, however, I have a few meetings in the suburbs, both of which entail 40 or so miles of driving, round trip. While I'd like to say we're pledging to limit our driving to under 100 miles this week, I'm not sure we're going to make that commitment this week.

I've discovered, however, that when gas prices have reached the nearly-$4-per-gallon mark, that my mindset about driving changed. Keep in mind, this is coming from a person who lives two blocks from work and generally only drives a couple of times a week. So I'm already far less dependent on gasoline than many, many people. But still, something changed.

See, before, when gas was a mere $2.50, or even $3 per gallon, I still was more than willing to drive across town, then come back home, then go out again, possibly in the same direction of where I had been before. Lately, though, I've put more thought into our car use, trying to consolidate trips so that one trip led to four or five errands being run at the same time.

Even yesterday, on our way back to Memphis from Nashville (where we dropped off the kids with my parents), we stopped at the Costco that is just off the interstate. We needed dog food (well, I guess the dogs needed the dog food, more accurately), and we went ahead and bought some other groceries, hoping to save a trip later in the week. A few months ago, we would've gone ahead home, then headed out to Costco later in the day, or the next day.

So I guess the goal is to see if we can make our current tank of gas (about 3/4 full) last for three weeks. I suppose it doesn't really matter how much we drive in the first week versus the second or third week. We're just going to drive only when we need to drive, and we'll not drive when we don't need to.

Which is why I'm not riding my bicycle to the dentist on Tuesday, and I'm not feeling bad about it.