The gas prices, they are killing me!

I'm dying. I'm taking my last breath and recording it here for you, my interpeeps.

Oh, ok, not really, but seriously? Wasn't it just a year ago that we were paying like $2.80 a gallon? We only thought we knew what high gas prices were.

The last couple of weeks the prices in my town are dangerously close to $4.00 a gallon. I know some of you are already there. Past there. I'm so sorry for you. I know my time is coming.

The astronomical prices are causing the Hairdryer family to rethink life. Specifically, how we can spend less money so we can have more of it to buy gas. Honey drives about 300 miles a day for his job. Since his job is the way we get money to pay our bills, he gets to use the gas whenever he feels like it. It's all about priorities.

We, meaning the kids and I, don't have jobs, per se, so we are the ones rethinking our gasoline usage. Here are some things we've been doing to help matters.

1. Using the library. I have an insatiable desire to read in the summers. It's not hard to spend $15 on a great novel. And, if you are in to reading series, like I am, that is $15 x 4 or 5 or 6 depending on how many books are in the series. So, I've committed to only reading books from the library this summer. I've read 11 books so far and only 2 were purchased, because I bought them before I turned over this new money saving leaf.
2. Less eating out. This has also helped with the loosing weight thing, by the way.
3. Spending more time at home. June was a veritable string of activities for the Hairdryer kids. Swimming lessons and basketball camp kept us away from home every morning for 3 solid weeks, plus baseball...well, you know... practice, games, and such. But July and August are pretty open. We have 3 days of VBS and that's it. So I'm committed to limiting our running around town to just 1 day a week. Wednesday is our chosen day since we have church on Wed. nights. We'll either go to the library or the Science Spectrum or other some such form of entertainment on Wednesdays. We'll take care of banking and all the other household errands on Wednesdays. We'll probably eat out on Wednesday evenings just to get all of our money saving ideas in on one day. I'll let you know how this one works for us.
4. Meal planning. I know, I've done it before. And really, I'm pretty consistent with it. Every 2 weeks or so I come up with a list of meal options for the Hairdryer household. I have all the recipes entered into my handy dandy recipe program, and with a mouse click here and a drag and drop there, viola!, I can print a grocery list complete with every item needed to make the meals on our options list. I've found that when I make this list, and, most importantly, stick to it when shopping, I spend waaay less money at the grocery store. (And something else really cool: if you enter a detailed recipe, the program will calculate the nutritional information for you. You Weight Watchers junkies out there love that kind of stuff, huh?)

So, that's my plan. I really can't think of anything else, but I would love to hear your thoughts. What is your family doing to help deal with the rising costs of gasoline, and just about everything else out there?