Yesterday was a new experience. Well,maybe I should say it was a new, old experience. What I’m referring to  is this: we have a car! My daughter, Shauna, left her car with us for a couple of days.

Her car is a clean diesel 2013 Volkswagen Jetta TDI. It’s an amazing car. The diesel engine is quiet, very powerful and gets more than 40mpg. In the old days, you could tell if a car was diesel-powered by the noise and the sooty deposits on the rear. Today, technology has made the exhaust emissions of diesel car engines so clean, you don’t even see deposits in the tailpipe!

We took advantage of the car by driving to Mission Valley. We shopped at Bed, Bath and Beyond. Donna wanted to buy a new set of sheets and a small rug to fit at the top of our entry stairs.

From there I took Donna to T’s Hair Salon in a neighborhood known as Normal Heights. T’s is on Adams Road near 33rd Street. The proprietor is Tonia Gutierrez Hill. We went to school together at Clairemont High School, here in San Diego.

While Donna was getting her hair done, I ran a couple of errands. One of my tasks was recycling bottles and cans. In California, plastic, glass and aluminum beverage containers are taxed. The tax is called California Redemption Value (CRV). For example, when you buy a six pack of beer, five cents per bottle (or can) is added to price. The extra 30 cents is shown on your receipt as CRV.

This looks like refundable deposit to me. I tried to return my bottles and cans to the store and claim my deposit. It doesn’t work that way! As I stated, CRV is really a tax. In fact, it’s double taxation because you also pay sales tax on the CRV amount!

There are recycling centers that will take your bottles and cans. I searched online and found seven recycling centers in San Diego. This doesn’t seem too convenient. After all San Diego is the eighth largest city in the USA. One of the recycling centers is in Clairemont, not too far from our location.

I took our bottles and cans to the center. I separated the plastic bottles, glass bottles and aluminum cans and put them into separate bins. The attendant weighed each bin and wrote the weights on a slip of paper. I took the paper to a counter where the cashier paid me $4.93 for the cans and bottles.

This is a weird scheme in my opinion. The state double taxes the sale, disguising it as a deposit. An independent business buys the bottles and cans, paying market scrap value. I don’t like it, but if I want to buy bottled water or beer in California, I’m stuck with it.

I drove back to Normal Heights to pick Donna up. It was 1pm and we were hungry. We walked from the hair salon to a Mexican restaurant on the corner of 32nd Street and Adams called El Zarape. The food was excellent.

We stopped again in Mission Valley to complete our shopping there. Donna bought a few things for the kitchen.

This morning, Donna drove to her exercise class in the Jetta. I’ll go for a bicycle ride later this morning and handle a few more errands this afternoon. Then I’ll return Shauna’s car.