I took my Suzuki SX4 into the shop today for its 15,000 mile service. I’ve been driving the car for three days short of six months. That’s 177 days. Or an average of 84 miles per day. Every day. If I was a law-abiding, speed limit-driving citizen and did 55 mph diligently, that would be 1 hour and 32 minutes in the car. Every day. Over 177 days, that’s a total of about 11 days and six hours spent behind the wheel. It all adds up when your home and your office are 58 miles apart. Fortunately, I generally don’t mind driving, since I get to listen to music and chat with the co-pilot, who commutes about 40 of the 58 miles with me every day. Marcia and I have been sort of casually starting to look for property in Columbia County, to cut my commute down while not making Marcia’s much longer, but I have a hard time finding the commute itself to be sufficient incentive to move. More pressing are factors like the fact that we have so much equity in our current home that we will be penalized in the financial aid sweepstakes when Katelin heads off to college in 2009. How perverse is that to think that we would be better off financially to sell this house and take out a big mortgage in order to make ourselves look less well-off so we don’t have to pay full college tuition? I don’t like to ponder such policy matters, even though I’m getting my degree in that field. And I also don’t like to ponder weather like we’re getting tomorrow, since that does create the one situation where the long drive is a good deal less than pleasant, what with all the ice, snow and generally yuckiness falling out of the sky. Do I ramble? Was that too many thoughts compressed into one paragraph? If so, that’s what writing papers for school does to me. Sorry.