private vehicle ownership or not?

Last night I went to my van, which I am driving less and less and when I turned the key to start it, nothing happened. My suspicion is that the starter battery doesn't have enough charge.

I needed the van last night to do a Costco run to get food that at work, we would be preparing all together as a meal team that some of us from work would tomorrow serve to the homeless at a shelter.

I did not end up doing that last night. I will leave work at lunch time today to hopefully get the van issue ironed out, go to Costco, and then return to work in the late afternoon/evening.

Today I'm going to discuss this with my father-in-law who has dealt with automotive issues often. Specifically my question is if I get a boost to get the van started and then drive to Costco, that is only about an eleven minute drive. Is there a risk that it won't start again from there once I leave Costco. Or, optionally, I can always buy a new battery at Costco while I am there, but I am hoping to spend as little as possible on this van as I want to get rid of it soon.

So, getting rid of it; does this mean replacing it with a new-to-me vehicle, or ditching private vehicle ownership altogether?

The reason I am not driving so much any more is that I only get the kids half of the time and during the time I don't have them, I use public transit pretty much exclusively. When I have them, G-bot and C-ling both have transit cards that get them wherever they need to go, and where I live is within walking distance of V-8's school, so this is what we've been doing since the school year has begun.

There are and there will be some mornings that driving V-8 to school would be preferable (to walking) due to icy road conditions, or very cold windy weather, or heavy downpours. This could happen perhaps a dozen times throughout the school year, maybe less. My idea for this is to hire an Uber to bring V-8 to school.

Perhaps about once a month I go to Costco for my own groceries; I could use public transit to get there, and hire an Uber to get me home. For regular groceries I am within walking distance of a grocery store.

A few times a year (May Long Weekend, Family Camp, Spartan Race) where in the past I have really needed to have a car as the destination is not transit reachable. In these few rare cases I could rent a vehicle.

For these times (and other pre-planned times where having a car would be handy) that I am having to do a big Costco order for my work's meal team, perhaps I would sign up for Commun-auto, a car sharing service. An issue with this car-sharing service is that their zone for vehicle retrieval and return doesn't go as far west in the city as I live by about 15km; so any time I need to use this service there is an extra 30km added on to whatever my needs are.

I guess I will take a closer look at what my car-usage needs have been over the last year and do a cost comparison between what it would take with private car ownership and what it would take with Transit/Uber/Commun-auto.

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A few from the deck of the house we rented this past weekend. Hopefully a more detailed post sometime in the next few days.

communal ant farms

We did not end up going to Burlington on the way to Enosborg Falls as we delayed our departure by an hour or so to give more time for V-8 to recuperate. It turns out that Thursday night into Friday morning she vomited a number of times and that continued into Friday and the last time was in the night Friday to Saturday. V-8 during all of this time was in a pretty foul mood. While no one is especially good to be around when they aren't feeling well, six-year-olds do not make it any easier.

Overall, though, we had a great time; the weather worked out and the house was lovely. I'll post a more detailed review in the coming days.

Today it is back to the whirlwind that is my existence. If you'll recall we had water damage in our house last summer.

Piano movers came today to move the piano from one room in our house to another as the room it was in is having the floor refinished.

Insurance company workers have come today to our house to remove the contents of the room that they are paying for to refinish the floor. Late last week we emptied the contents of two other rooms whose floors will be refinished that we are paying for.

Those same insurance company workers will be emptying our basement of its contents so that a carpet company can then redo the floor there where they will lay down some plywood directly on the cement floor, and then apply carpeting to the plywood.

Finally, the insurance workers will replace everything back where it was, and the piano movers will come back to put the piano back.

During the time that the floor is getting sanded and varnished, we will not be living in our house as the dust and more specifically the toxicity of the varnish is too much at time of application for non-equipped residents to bare. During this time we (including Leo) will be living in a nearby hotel that we picked because it includes breakfast. If we're smart about it, we may be able to scheme kids lunches from the breakfast.

So while this past weekend I did get to relax, it wasn't really enough to recharge.

As we were still on our MLW vacation yesterday, I decided to change my intermittent fasting day to be today, so all I have for eating today is a tuna sandwich.

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