Month of August 2024 (Nat’l Avg $3.483)

If "regular" is $3.492, does that mean 87 E10 ?
In Naperville where I like to fill up, I paid
$4.249 today.
73 deg F, wind SE 5

32.6 miles, 51.4 MPG.

I'm pretty sure those blankety-blank blankers at my Honda dealer
let the air out of my tires yesterday. My gauge is in the Elantra, so I can't check until later.

The fillup info : 415.4 miles, 8.636 gallons, fcd = 52.0 MPG.

 

Where did all the traffic go? Looked like about half the volume, but those on the road were driving with a deathwish.
At 82F with light NE wind, I covered 18.4 miles at 65.6mpg. Funny that it's about 0.1 mile extra to reroute to stop at the Shell station.
First of the month and I figured I should gas up while it's sunny. The pump price is 3.299 but the local supermarket earns you points for gas as you spend money on groceries so I got 50 cents off, or 2.799. And the Chase card is doing 5% off this quarter at gas stations, so that's another 14 cents a gallon off.
I stuffed the tank a little to get the total to 27.00, so 9.646 gallons. Nice to think you can't even jam ten gallons in there, and what you can fit in the tank lasts for weeks rather than days.

 

Oh, that's just the great american driver attitude, "If the road is clear, we'll speed & its the people driving the speed limit, who cause the accidents".

 

Sign of things to come post-COVID with everyone preferring to work from anywhere but from the office?

 

As for me: post-COVID or pre-COVID.... I preferred to play, anywhere but at work. Retirement has proven to me that......I always had the right attitude.

 

The family of Osprey in the Tower nest near our apt. complex has been very active & vocal. They know they will be migrating by the end of the month & are trying to make as much of a mark on our community as they can before they leave. & they do that well!

Unfortunately, the Eagle nest on the river's south shore, was NOT successful this year. I think one of the Bald Eagle pair must have died. An immature Bald Eagle sat on the nest for some days, trying to attract a mate, which she/he did, but that, of course, didn't succeed.

 

From 7-30-24:
12:35PM.....Another report of getting a FREE can of "something", but the label was missing. Opening the can completely, it was some chunk pineapple! Oh, whoa, I love pineapple....
PS, 3:35PM....Some more unlabeled FREE cans of "something". One opened is a can of corn. The luck continues.
///////
8-3-24:
11:55AM....Another unlabeled FREE can of "something". Its a can of string beans. Not my favorite, because they don't keep their flavor like corn or peas. But what IS nice, is the can was packed with beans & not filled with as much water as most cans of beans. Yes, lots of beans! I wonder what brand it was?
Anyhow, the taste is still bland canned string beans. Someone said, add some Tabasco. So I did. Well...only slightly better. Took some Celery Seed powder, which perked up tomato soups. OK but.....Canned string beans need something more. Can't beat fresh string beans!

 

Today it was 73 deg F in Naperville and 78 in Elk Grove when I got to work at 5:00.

Wind SSW 6

35.2 miles,fcd = 54.9 MPG.

I was tired when I got home from Michigan yesterday,
and I didn't remember to check the tire pressure on the Fit.
The Elantra did very well on this trip. I left my notes and receipts
in the car, but I will report tomorrow. But I remember this : for
the 80.5 miles from my BP in Chesterton IN to my house in Aurora IL, the fcd showed 83.7 MPG.
Yes, lots of lower speed traffic, which is of course where a hybrid shines.
Close to 4000 miles on the car now.

 

Yes, the Elantra is old & ancient now.

 

Looks like a number of sunspots on Sol have lined up. Possibly not the strongest aurorae will be created, but should be stretched out over a number of days. If you can find some areas in your region that are pretty dark, you might have some good Aurorae.

 

It's tough to find a spot around here without too much light.
If I go about 15 miles outside Aurora, on a clear evening, before I turn into a pumpkin..... maybe. It's been 50 years since I've seen a good show.

 

We used to do a lot of astronomy, traveling east & then north into the Cascade Mnts. To the north, was mostly wilderness all the way to the Canadian border & beyond. Good dark skies & when the skies were clean & steady, we saw a lot of galaxies, some even dimmer than was supposedly possible for the telescopes we used.
With a 40 inch telescope put together at the Oregon star party(& disassembled once the party was over), that you had to climb a ladder 15 feet in the air to see thru the eyepiece, I was seeing galaxies 1 billion light-years away. Not photographs with time lapse cameras, but the galaxies with actual photons from the galaxies entering my eye. Once they put me in charge of an 18inch GOTO telescope & I was showing galaxies that were cluster members of Perseus/Pisces Galaxy Super-Cluster. We would look at one galaxy cluster, which the members were gravitationally linked together. Then I would change co-ordinates & the telescope would GOTO another galaxy cluster that we would look at.....& that galaxy cluster was gravitationally linked to the first galaxy cluster(the definition of a Galaxy Super-Cluster). The whole Galaxy Super-Cluster was spread 80 widths of our Moon across the sky in a raggedy line. But the large majority of the galaxies of the Galaxy Super-Cluster were 2000 TIMES dimmer than the human eye can see by itself.

 

Cloudy today and rain until Sunday afternoon with the hurricane meandering up the coast.
At 79F with light southwest wind, the 18.3 miles ended at 67.6 FCD. I always hope to hit more traffic so the number goes higher. The 10 miles covered at highway speed cuts into the trip FE.

 

1:15PM.....Hurricane/Tropical Storm Debby dumped lots of rain on the SE states, sometimes 19 inches. Alligators strolled through cities....fish thought they had new waterways. Lest one think, all other US places would be preferable, California has had deadly spores break out in festivals, creating unhappy times out of happy times. Might as well stay where you are. If you're going to have bad times, ya don't need to travel to bad times. I always thought tourists has double-bad luck, when they paid to travel to their paid hotels/motels & those hotels/motels were hit by storms.

 

FREE....free wood by the side of the road? You must have been in Washington state! Lots of wood here! OK, OK.....There's a lot of wood in England, too.

 

Michigan trip in Elantra, August 2-4 :
From Chesterton IN to Bloomfield Hills MI
and back to Chesterton.
Filled at the same pump both times.
461.8 miles, fcd = 71.9 MPG.