Cheaper By The Gallon

School is back in session and after-school activities are already in full swing.  Tuesday’s are Soccer Practice nights, as well as K spends the morning at church with her mothers and toddlers group.  Thursdays and Fridays are more soccer and then Jazz dancing class and ballet.  We are lucky so far this year that only three of our weekdays are taken up with activity, but even so we are consuming gas at a much higher rate.

On Sunday while driving home from church I pulled into an AM-PM and figured I would fill it up then.  It was $2.64 a gallon, which was a little higher than the one closer to home, but we were almost out completely.  Naturally the outdoor pre-pay ATM doohickeys were all down, and the inside of the “convenience store” was packed with people trying to pay and buying their diabetic starter kits.  This place was like fricken candy land!  I would not have been surprised if Oompa Loompas had spilled out of a floor board and began to polish the candy cane floor boards.

Well apparently all of their computers were down, and it was cash-only.  They gleefully pointed people over to the stand-alone ATM as they continued to take other people’s cash and set them up on a pump.  It took me a little while to understand that this was precisely the case.  They had already sent the hip-hop-Fly-Girl dressed lass in front of me back outside, stating that the cash portion of the exterior machines was in fine working order.  This again was not the case, and she came back into the shop this time heading to the back of the line.  Quite frankly I thought it served her right, for dressing like Pokipsy Elliot and getting out of line to ask in the first place.

I used all of my cash and handed the gal running the register my $4.  I was not going to use the ATM, not at a convenience store.  That’s an invitation for the Oompa Loompas from the floorboards to come out and sing about you.

What do you get when you don’t carry cash?
You get a charge that you pay out the ass.

Care for the planet with alternative fuel
If you drove a hybrid, you would be cool
Just like the, Oompa… *spinning with goal post arms*
Oompa Loompa Doopity Do!

Anyway, the 1 and a half gallons got us back down the hill and to home.  Meaning I had to go back out yesterday and fill it up for real before today – the first big fuel waster.  Fuel Waster Tuesdays is what I call it – but it has to be said in the Monster Truck Show commercial voice.

And a good thing too!  It was only $2.53 a gallon, woo hoo!  I slid my card in that pre-pay box and pumped all 21.x gallons into my tank.  Meanwhile this lady wearing mom-jeans and her mega-hot daughter (or significantly younger lover) pulled up and partook in the great rate.  “Daughter” looked like a less-trashy porn star, sporting Paris Hilton type glasses (which I hate).  Those things remind me of tinted sneeze guards at the salad bar.  The mom took her time at the black box of pre-payedness, which isn’t unusual – here if you don’t have a crisp bill, the origami feature in the cash machine deems your bill unworthy, but it takes a while for it to decide sometimes.

This wasn’t the case.  I returned for my receipt after I pumped my gas, standing in her cloud of mom-jeans filtered exhaust.  She was over here cutting muffins while I was pumping and checking out her daughter/lover.  I bet she thought her rank gift would have dispersed faster than it did, her standing in the breezeway (no pun intended) in an outdoor through fare near the main drag in town.  Alas, it did not and I was able to sample her wares with a hint of corn for free.

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