Motor Fuel Costs

A few days ago, I was able to buy gasoline for the Chev at the rate of $2.99/gallon. How nice. Filling the truck costs $65 at that rate, instead of the $80-plus that I've been used to. With all the commuting I've done this year, it feels as though we've spent most of our income on motor fuel. To see if that was true, I ran some numbers. As you can see from the graph (above), we spent around $4200 on petrol in 2013. I'm not going to go into detail about our monthly income and benefits, but let's just say that $4200 comes out pretty close to 10% of our take-home pay. Wow. It seems like a lot of the cash that comes in the door goes straight into the fuel tank. On the other hand, when I researched this topic before, I found that the AAA holds that the costs of car ownership are second only to the costs of housing for most families, so maybe it shouldn't be such a surprise.

What did surprise me about my data, though, is that our 2011 and 2012 costs were around $3900 for both years—only about $300 less than 2013—even though I wasn't commuting in 2011 or 2012. What can explain that? Well, there are probably three factors right? 1. Vehicle fuel efficiency; 2. Miles driven; 3. Price of motor fuel. We did switch vehicles between 2012 and 2013, swapping the defunct Sable for the Saturn. The Saturn is slightly less efficient than the Sable was, so we've used more gallons of fuel for every mile driven in 2013. But, again, with the amount of commuting I've done, this should argue for a significantly higher gasoline bill in 2013 . . . which we really didn't have. So, if our petrol costs are not being driven (no pun intended) by fuel efficiency or miles behind the wheel, what is left? Yep. The price at the pump.

Indeed, when I do a simple regression using the standard international benchmark (Brent) for crude oil prices against our gasoline spending, I get a good correlation, with an "r" value of 77. When I drop 2010 from the regression because it is an outlier (we drove to Montana in the Chev at least two times), the correlation is even stronger: my "r" is 86. Granted, I have only a few data points, and I've not taken the time to generate any measures of variance, but I feel pretty comfortable with the explanation. (If you want to double check my regression, I'll send you the data.)

Even more interesting (at least to me) than the foregoing is that, by the local benchmark crude, West Texas Intermediate (WTI), gasoline should have been cheaper in 2011, 2012, and 2013 than it is. For the first time in history, these two benchmark prices for crude oil have deviated, with Brent being significantly higher than WTI for the past few years. (You can look at the data here.) This is because, as The Economist points out, the United States is producing a significant amount of domestic crude that has been stock-piled in Cushing, Oklahoma. There are bottle-necks in domestic transport and refining capacity that have created a glut of unrefined crude. The glut pushes down the price of crude, but the refining and transport bottle-necks keep the price of gasoline high.

Creative Lighting

VSO used luminara—candles in paper bags—to light The Homestead on Christmas Eve. I think it looked pretty good. (You just have to ignore the junk appliance on the front porch.)

Christmas Eve

My Christmas Eve tradition is to take the skis out for an afternoon or evening tour. With afternoon temperatures reaching the mid- to high-40s for the last two or three days, however, this year's performance had to change. Don't get me wrong, it is nice to be outdoors in the afternoon, but the snow is melting fast and what is left is pretty sloppy and gloppy at 48F. The solution was to take a lap before the sun cleared the canyon wall this morning. So, that's what I did. I went out to Center Creek at 8:30a while everything was still frozen. Between VSO and me, we'd built a pretty good track through both the lower and the upper meadows over the last couple of weeks. The entire loop is just a shade over two miles in length. The snow was firm and I was cold, so I went out hard. I'm not trying to intimidate anyone who is hoping to make the team traveling to Sochi later this winter, but I clocked in at 30 minutes on the nose—a 4.1 MPH moving average. (If the Organizing Committee wants to give me a call, I will talk with them, but I'm pretty much retired, and I think we ought to let the younger athletes go to Russia.)

Rural Ways Exclusive

It has been a while since we featured our favorite painter in a post. With this new work (above) coming off the easel, we thought it was time to highlight the local talent again. VSO has not shown this picture anywhere yet, so I'll give my readers the first shot at it. Make me a five-figure offer and I'll see if I can get it for you. (I assure you that my commission will not exceed 40%.)

Speaking of our favorite painters, VSO has also made a page on this website called "Look-at-Me." Rural Ways has not visited Look-at-Me because it seems faddish, especially when compared to cutting and splitting wood for the stove. In any case, I've been told that you can make friends on the site. If you want to make friends with a famous artist, click HERE.

Texas Wants You Anyway

I was pretty far from the road when I heard someone coming up. Revving and grinding and carrying on. They got pretty close to where I was parked and then the noise stopped. I couldn't see them, but it made me a little nervous. Were they trying to park in my spot? The snow was deep and I was afraid that if they tried to pull in there they'd hit me or something.

After another ten minutes of climbing around, I'd rimmed out. Couldn't go up, couldn't go down. I went back the way I'd come and tried another route, but had no luck. The sun was down, so I decided to call it a day. When I got back to the road, there was no one in sight. But there were no new tracks in the snow, either. Whoever had been there had gone back down when they got to the Chev. I wondered why.

On my way out, I watched their tracks. They were obviously struggling. In and out of the ditch, and a lot of footprints. Finally, I saw them. The young lady was on the road and the guy was driving . . . sort of. They were gangsters. Hat backwards, hoodies, tattoos, cigarettes. They were also stuck. I pulled up and got out. They had a two-wheel drive sport ute (rear wheel), a little dog in a sweater, and nothing else. No coats, no hats, no gloves, no boots, no shovels. Nothing. At least they were wearing pants and shoes.

I offered to pull them out. They took me up on it. The guy pointed to his license plate. Texas. "I've never driven in the snow," he said. (I hate to do this to Lyle Lovett, another Texan, but at this point in the story, I have to steal one of his lines: "As if I couldn't tell." Actually, that might be the second line of his that I've stolen for this post.)

It took me a few minutes to get hooked up to them, to pull them back onto the road, and to make sure they were straightened away. During that time, they talked a lot. They told me about how they had planned to move to Utah. And so on. But, by the end of the monologue (duologue?), the young lady, through a haze of cigarette smoke, concluded that, "We're going back to Texas. We're not cut out for this."

First Tracks

While I've used the skis to do a little recon at work this fall, I'd not yet taken them out for a holiday lap. So, yesterday, during the second big snow storm of the week, I went up to Center Creek. I parked at the ford, which was frozen, and skied across the ice. The road was untracked. I broke trail to the upper meadow and put in one loop. Then I skied back to the ford. While I was in the upper meadow, some yayhoo drove over the ford on his ATV and flipped a couple of donuts in the lower meadow. He (or she) was gone by the time I got back. I don't really care what ATVers do, but this genius had to thrash my track. I don't understand it. The whole road is empty, he has a motor, he can go anywhere, but he has to drive up my track. Why? I guess it is typical modern American behavior: When you see someone else out in the woods, you can't leave them alone, you have to follow them. Are y'all lonely? Anyway, this motorhead gave me the opportunity to break trail twice, once going up and once coming down. But, my three readers are not here to listen to me complain all day. They want the data. So, here they are: Total Distance 1.86 miles; time 39:08; moving average 2.9 mph; maximum speed 5.1 mph.

Phenomena

If you have more then one phenomenon, you have phenomena. At The Homestead, we've had two in as many days. Yesterday it was the snow; today it is the temperature. When I left the house for work, the thermometer said minus eight. By the time I passed Paragonah on the freeway, the car thermometer said minus 28. Twenty-eight below zero on December 5th? I won't say it has never happened, but it has certainly never been recorded. In fact, the low temperature record for this day at the Cedar City airport was set in 1972 at minus five. Today, 41 years later, the Cedar City airport reached minus 18, beating the old record by a whopping 13 degrees. The other thing is that we've gone through this already during 2013. In January, we had a record cold snap that took us to minus 22. I honestly didn't think we'd see that again, maybe ever. But now we've beaten it, and it isn't even January yet.

Phenomenon

Yesterday EDO returned from school with a new word: Phenomenon. She told us that it stood for an unusual occurrence, often associated with a rare weather event. Before Elijah noticed the still small voice, for example, he witnessed three phenomena: Wind, earthquake, and fire. Well, at The Homestead we had another example overnight. Snow. We awoke to nearly 10 inches of fresh powder. I won't say that it has never happened, but it was certainly an unusually large storm for the first week of December.

No Name Mesa

This time we drove through east Zion and into Springdale for an art festival. From the park tunnel to I-15 (and beyond) it was one long stream of bumper to bumper traffic. The line may have been unbroken all the way to San Bernardino. I didn't check. But, I would just like to post this word of encouragement: This is great. This is Utah. Please enjoy Zion. Do not limit yourself in any way. Drive as fast as traffic will allow. Throw your trash on the ground. (That strip of hair growing under your lip is revolutionary—how did you think of it?) We hope you love the lodging in Springdale. We're building a lot more of it. See? Stay as long as you like. And when it is time to go, you'll want to use the southbound ramp at I-15.

In the meantime, EDO and I went up the Smithsonian Butte road and found a two-track going out to the edge of the mesa. We parked about half way down and found a little wash to explore. There was petrified wood, there were rocks to climb, and there was a lot of cactus. The roar of traffic from the valley was faintly audible, but it was quiet in the wash. I could hear the call of the canyon wren and sometimes the familiar "hoooo-oot" from Ellen when I'd been out of sight for too long. We each ate a sandwich and EDO stuffed her pockets with tiny crystal-filled rocks that sparkled in the strong light.

Just as the sun—low in the sky—began to swing around to our side of the butte, it was time to go back to the crowds. Sure enough, we picked up a tailgater from Los Angeles within five minutes. (My apologies. I hope I didn't dampen your enthusiasm for Springdale. Please visit often.) We also picked up VSO from art show duty just in time to join the stream of traffic through Rockville. It was bumper to bumper all the way to La Verkin. Fortunately, based on my advice, many of our friends turned south towards Hurricane, and I could finally drive really, really fast.