All Under Control
Monday. I wasn't telling the truth yesterday when I said I was out of the little sinus-headache pills. I did have one remaining and yesterday after posting I got to thinking, well, the sinus-head thing isn't all that terrible at the moment, but why not take this last remaining pill and pay attention for the next hour, see if it really does have an effect. (This after a year of taking them sporadically and wondering if they were worth keeping around.) It seems they do. It doesn't catch it all, but it does seem to head a lot of it off at the pass. So, when the refill arrives I'll welcome it with a glass of water and not run out of them again (the little devils). Who says you can't learn as you grow older? Not I. Here in Oakland.
Breakfast this morning at the usual place, walking rather than driving, a picture of the 76 station with their new posted price, reading an interesting article in The New York Times about gas prices and how they affect rural areas to a much greater extent than people like me who live in cities. It talked about gas prices being ten to fifteen percent of a rural population's income. Ten to fifteen percent because of the distances that people need to drive to work (or the local store) in older vehicles such as pick up trucks that get something like ten miles a gallon. Ten to fifteen percent is a lot of percent.
I'm guessing gas is costing me ten dollars a week tops, yet even that has obviously gotten my attention if only in that I'm writing about it, not because of the cost, but evidently for whatever this implies for the years to come. Strange. This obviously kicks in somewhere at a deep psychological level, a survival reaction in every one of us whether we be millionaires or hobos.
Hobos?
A term once used by the parents of people my age when we were young. Woody Guthrie and all that: hopping freights, soup kitchens, fascism in Europe, no jobs. Nothing we'll ever see again, I'm sure, now that we have it all under control.
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