It's an Odd Kind of Feeling

In the past week I've come to realize there is much in my daily life that I take for granted. One morning last week there was a power outage in the area for 3 hours, from 3:30am to 6:30am. It was the little things like getting the car out of the garage after having to manually release the electric garage door opener and also drying my hair after a candlelight shower (not nearly as romantic as it sounds as hey...I was alone and brrrrr...it was getting cold in the house!) that caused me to realize how much I take electricity for granted. Flip a switch and the room lights up...or not. The 'not' was hard to get used to as was evidenced by the numerous rooms that filled with light when the power came back on as room after room I'd flipped the switch out of habit even though I knew the power was off.

Case #2: A few weeks back there was a refinery fire. I've heard of it happening before but don't remember being directly impacted as we have been this time.

Last Saturday the tv and radio stations were mentioning that there could be some sort of gas shortage coming up due to the refinery fire but they didn't seem to be saying enough to cause panic...or in my case, cause me to fill up my tank. Yes I put in $25.00 which took me to about 3/4 of a tank and figured I'd wait for the prices to come down before completely filling up.

Fast forward 24 hours and this was what I drove by after leaving church. Station after station displaying nothing but zeros in their price field. Yup...they were completely out of gas. Hmmm...weird. It just felt...weird...and a little sureal. Here in Canada I don't ever remember a time that we completely ran out of gas at stations. I remember during the blackout of 2003 we couldn't get gas for a day or so due to most of the province being without power but never stations running out of gas.


As I drove to meet my parent's for lunch that Sunday I decided to err on the side of caution, pay a hugely inflated price for gas of 99.9 cents/litre (when it had been 77 cents just a few days prior) and fill my tank. Just wanted peace of mind. Thankfully my car is amazing on gas and that lone tank has taken me over 450km this past week and I still have over a quarter of a tank left.

About the gas shortage, it's still happening. One day a station has gas (with inflated prices and long lines snaking around the block) and the very next day it's closed because it has run out. It's hard to be loyal to one particular company right now as basically people are just going to whatever station they can find that's open.

They say it's getting better and I hope they're right. Time will tell...as will my pocket book as I'm sure they'll use this excuse to keep gas prices high for a very long time.

I'm not sure how far spread this shortage is. I think it's limited to Canada but might be wrong about that. Have you been affected?