Correction to latest driving update

I was right to be suspicious about my mileage in Driving update for July 2013 for my car.

The last update noted that I rolled over 216,000 miles on April 19, 2013.  That's 61 days ago.  That means I drove 16.4 miles per day and 500.0 miles/month.  That's much higher than last month.
...
This is the most I've driven in a month since October 2010, when I drove 630 miles/month and was still posting these updates to LiveJournal.

Now I'm trying to figure out how I drove 4.5 more miles/day and 132.5 miles/month more than I drove last month.  Part of it is that I have been driving a couple miles per workday to get food as the cafe where I teach closed down for the summer in the middle of the last week of June, but that's only about 50 miles at most.  It also was something I was doing last year at this time when I was only driving 10.3 miles/day and 311.4 miles/month and actually decrease my driving since the May 2012 update.  That doesn't work.  There were also days that I drove to the store instead of walking because of rain and thunderstorms.  There was also a relatively long trip to a meeting that was not part of my regular schedule.  Still, I'm surprised all that added up to more than 100 miles.

I didn't drive that much more.  In fact,the only things above that were correct were the days that I rolled over the odometer.  The rest resulted from a series of cascading errors that began with me forgetting an entire month.  Derp.  There were other mistakes, but why worry about mice when there are elephants about?

Now, how much did I really drive per day and month?  The correct number of days between the two events was 81.  1000 miles/81 days=12.35 miles/day.  That's 376.5 miles/month (30.5 day months).  That's only 0.35 miles/day and 4.4 miles/month more than the 11.90 miles/day and 363.1 miles/month during the previous 1000 miles.  Now, that I can believe!

As for why I made such a silly error, I can blame it on Mercury Retrograde, which I used as a joke reason for why Kunstler's blog wasn't displaying properly in Firefox yesterday.

I have my own unscientific explanation–Mercury Retrograde. The planet Mercury is currently being observed as moving in reverse. When that happens, astrologers claim that communication and transportation go awry. This includes electronic communication and devices that support it. Based on this woo-woo story, glitches like this are more likely.

Of course, this is all BS. My official position on astrology is that it’s bunk, but it’s harmless, fun bunk that tells great stories. It even tells an interesting story about me.

Or I could chalk it up to the driving update being the first post requiring thought that I wrote since one of our dachshunds died.  I still haven't recovered from that.