What's that in the driveway?

Yes, it's a car.

We're approaching the time of our move to a patch of land adjacent to a small town west of Ottawa. We knew that would mean becoming car owners again. My husband likens this to taking up smoking again after having successfully quit and kept off the vile things for a long, long time. And he's right. It's shaming and strange.

We're making a trade of sorts - we once again will have the responsibility and guilt associated with running a car, but we've deliberately situated our new home in a place where we will still be able to walk and cycle to most of the day-to-day places we need to go (school, dentist, bank, post office, farmer's market, library, coffee shop, etc.). We're expecting to look at the car sitting idle in the driveway quite a lot. The other part of the "trade" is the fact that we'll be able to grow more of our own food and we'll be living in a house that is much, much greener and energy efficient than our current drafty 1940s model.

And, as our monthly budget will never tire of reminding us, we made sure that we paid more so that we could drive the greenest car available at the moment (that would be a VW diesel, folks, and not a hybrid). My dream would be to go back to car sharing, and we've discovered that our nearest neighbours are also former Vrtucar users and Ottawans, so who knows where that might lead? (We've actually asked Vrtucar about whether they'd consider expanding West of Ottawa to our town, but that hasn't gone anywhere at this point.)

Speaking of paying more for the necessities of life, I invite you to walk on over to my new blog to read about paying more for clean energy in your home.