I remember taking a summer off from UBC one year and heading back to Chilliwack. At the time gas was sitting at around 39 cents per litre. It’s hard to imagine that it’s only been around ten years since then and gas is now hovering at around 140 cents a litre in the Vancouver area. To put that into context, the $60 I spend filling up my car would have cost around $16 back then. In fact, now that I’m back in the Vancouver area, it’s not lost on me just how expensive it is to own and operate a car. I have a 2006 Mazda 3 Sport that I own outright. My insurance runs me around $135 a month ...

As I get older and a bit wiser, I’m starting to see the wisdom in not always buying the cheapest items. That’s never been a problem when it comes to technology, as I’m attracted to shiny objects. But when it comes to items like food, it’s a bit more challenging to spend an extra dollar or two on a dozen eggs, or to buy hormone free ground beef. Lately I’ve been making purchases that I wouldn’t have made in the past, mostly people I’ve been trying to go out of my way to help smaller businesses. One such transaction I made before Christmas was to go to a local tire shop and buy a set ...

I spent some time at lunch today giving my car a bunch of TLC. I’ve noticed this last little while that the tires are slipping a lot, so I suspected that they were pretty much toast. I had a tread test done on them yesterday, and they came back at 4/32s, 5/32s, 5/32s, and 10/32s, the last one being the tire I replaced that blew up on the way to Seattle last year. 2/32s is the legal limit, and 4/32s is where you basically stop having traction in the rain and snow. I might have been able to squeeze another 4 months or so out of these in the summer, but I just decided to bite the bullet and put ...

Sometime in the near future I have to take my car in and get the tires replaced on it. Without a doubt, the tires on it currently (the ones that came on it when I bought it brand new) are pretty much the worst tires I’ve ever had. The handling in rain is pretty bad, and totally horrible in the snow. In fact, I nearly bought the farm a few times in Vancouver when it snowed. One time I was coming up to my place (which was at the bottom of a slight hill) and couldn’t stop, so I ended up sliding down to the end of the cul-de-sac. Had a car been there, I wouldn’t have been able to stop myself ...