Driving again.

OK, can you stand another post about driving? I mentioned that our
car is a daily-rent-a-car which means every day, Jeremy goes on line
and reserves it for a day and every night he comes home and asks, “Do
you need the car tomorrow?” Ummm, yes! So then he books another
day at an outrageously high rental rate because we are renting this
car from a car-share, basically for people who need a car for an
afternoon once-in-a-while while we are negotiating a year-long
rental. But it takes time and I need to drive 60 km a day –
but I keep telling myself that tomorrow I’ll give up the car and take
taxis again until we have our long term rental, but I’m addicted. So
we’ve rented for 4 days in a row when we promised ourselves only 2
days – just to try it out… Yeah, right, like you can only
eat one Dorito. Tonight, I told Jeremy that I’d like the car again
tomorrow, but tonight we went on line and found out someone else
rented the car! Grrr. So we returned the car today. What am I going
to do?
Driving one’s own car in Singapore is extremely expensive. If you
think that driving in the US costs and arm and a leg, in Singapore,
it’s basically 10 arms and legs. I’m going to have to chop off
everyone’s appendages (including Ruby’s) to pay for this. So even
though I’m shelling out all this money for my car (my beautiful, very
desired car), I still love to save money and I have a game I play
everyday in the car to save moolah. (You know, when you save money by
spending money… right…) My idea is to save money on parking! You
pretty much have to pay for parking everywhere in Singapore. I’m
lucky I don’t have to pay for parking it in the basement of my
apartment building, but I do have to pay for parking to drop off and
pickup Vincent at his preschool which is a bummer. But I have
discovered that if I do the pickup and drop off in less than 10
minutes, it’s free! Free! Free! It’s tricky because I have to take
the elevator from the basement to the 4th floor, which
doesn’t seem like much, but the elevators are aggravatingly slow and
stop on every floor and then you have to make small talk with the
teachers/parents and then you gotta wait for the teachers to take
Vince’s temperature to make sure he isn’t suffering from
Hand/Foot/Mouth disease and then crappy…
It’s not free.
Also, my parking nightmare is coming into focus. At Edda’s school,
the parking is free, (Free! Free!), but the space is tiny and there
are buses and parents dropping kids off, so there are a million
people/vehicles coming and going and I have to do the butt-in parking
in 3 seconds with everyone waiting and watching. Talk about nervous
and performing under pressure. Today, I actually had to get a (very
nice) teacher to park the car for me. (Maybe he’ll do it everyday for
me?) He was very competent and did a fantastic job (maybe he teaches
driver’s ed?) and then as soon as we were in a space, another mom
promptly blocked me in. So while I waited for the other (Mercedes
minivan!) mom to move her car, I watched some construction workers
tear a building down across the street. Vince would have loved that.
Oh, the best thing yet, I went to a gas station for the first time
in a year, I put some gas in the car. It was a nice full service
Mobil station, where a very cheerful teenager filled my tank up and I
went inside to a the convenience store and I ogled the snacks, they
had very nice snacks – much better than the ones in the US. I
had no idea what I was missing. I did not purchase any –
sometimes those kiwi pandan rolls can taste weird.