Tag: utilities

Tuesday’s Theme Music

Mood: retrospective

Good morning. It’s Tuesday, October 3, 2023. 52 F outside, it’s foggy and wet. A light rain falls in Ashlandia, where the water is limited and the optimism is eternal.

A prepondence of Ashlandia trees have embraced autumn and show its effects in their color stylings. This isn’t true in my neighborhood slice. I guess the trees here are late adopters. All immediately outside my window remains verdant with a wet sheen. We’re warm and dry in the house, and the domino effect is that it’s a cozy fall morning. Coffee has brewed, embedding the ambiance with wistful nostalgia.

I’m happy that it’s still shorts weather.

Meanwhile, the cats take opposite approaches to the fall weather shift. Papi, the young ginger blade who likes being outside, came in from the rain and colder temperatures. Right now, he’s posing on the master bed, looking calm and majestic in the soft grey light through the windows. Tucker, a big old cat with thick back and white fur, has headed outside and is curled up and asleep by the front porch cairn, protected from rain by the eaves.

While it’s cool now, we’re going to work our way up to 69 F. People aren’t doing much of the work; the sun, wind, and air do the heavy shifting today.

I tried Amla — Indian Gooseberry — powder today. My wife is always searching for healthy additions to our diet and habits. She’d read about amla and ordered the powder off the net. I added a serving to my oatmeal this morning. The gooseberry powder infused the oatmeal with a sweet berry flavor that I much enjoyed. I’ll be on watch for its impact on my health.

I have “City of New Orleans” as covered by Arlo Guthrie in the morning mental music stream (Trademark screwy). The Neurons selected it because I was reviewing a bill last night from the City of Ashland. This is a utility bill – water, electric, sewer, storm drain, street and street lights. $104 for the month. Half of it is services, fees, and taxes. Part of that is because the electricity charges are offset by our solar panels. 2K, I had them installed back in 2010.

I see clearly how The Neurons were thinking: City of Ashland = “City of New Orleans”.

While I searched for a video version of the song I wanted, I discovered a fascinating video of Mike Campbell explaining how “Boys of Summer” was written. I’ve always enjoyed that song and had wondered who the guitarist was when it was first released. Turned out to be Mike Campbell.

Campbell, who played with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, also backed Don Henley and Stevie Nicks. He’s a guitarist who I’ve long respected for his clean and simple playing style, so hearing this tale was a treat. It was also a fascinating reveal of some modern rock history, and an engrossing explanation in how he and Henley wrote the song, “Boys of Summer”. Many obstacles and near disasters were overcome. Check it out if you have a moment.

Campbell’s closing remarks reverberated with the writer in me. “When you hit a stumbling block, you gotta keep going. Don’t give up. Keep pushing, pushing, pushing, and working till you get it right.”

Stay pos and fresh, strong and optimistic. Coffee has been guzzled on my end. I’m ready to commence the day. With a morning like this, I’m expecting to have a good day.

Here’s the music. Cheers

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Monday – Three Things

  1. $.49. That was our electric bill for last month (May, 2020, for the calendar impaired): forty-nine cents. To break it down, we used $14.99 worth of electricity, and we were paid $14.50 for our solar panel energy. The rest of the bill wasn’t as good. Twenty-six and change for water. We had a wet June this year, so our water use was about half of what it was for the same time last year, even though we planted a garden this year and skipped it last year. Our utilities (gas is on separate bill), then, were about twenty-seven dollars. The one hundred dollar monthly bill’s remainder, about seventy-two dollars, were taxes and fees. Yeah, it’s a regular rant; I can’t save much on my monthly city bill because most of it is taxes and fees.
  2. WordPress Editor. I’ve returned to the ‘classic’ WP editor. Didn’t like the new stuff. Found it intrusive, counter-intuitive, and irritating. It was a change I didn’t want. And that’s okay, as I went back to the old way. No one’s rights or safety was threatened by my move back to how it was.
  3. I can’t keep up. My muses tell me the story too fast for my mind, and waaayyy too fast for my fingers. They don’t tell it in order and they’re always filling in the gaps. I get excited by what they’re telling me and their implications, and jump up to pace off my excitement. It’s a fun road that I follow, that struggle to write.

Got my coffee. Time to write like crazy, at least one more time.

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The Take

Our utility bill arrived the other day. Coming from the city, this bill includes electricity, water, sewage, and a few other things.

Although there’s a total, of course – this is what I’ll pay – it’s categorized and subtotaled. The top part is about electricity. That part pleased me; it showed that thanks to the time of year and our solar panels, the city was paying us three dollars for our electricity. We owed nothing. That was sweet.

Next down was the water. We’d used less water than last year, but it came out to $45 due the city for water. The rest of the $89 bill due was for sewage, drains, street use, and street lights. That’s sobering, because there’s nothing I can do about any of that, except move to somewhere else.

Overall, I was pleased. To put this take in complete context, we have an eighteen hundred square foot single level stand-alone residence built in 2005. It’s located in Ashland, in southern Oregon. Two humans and four cats live there. All humans are over fifty. Our solar panels are rated at two thousand watts, but due to a number of circumstances, they usually won’t generate that much. I was impressed to see them putting out over two thousand when I checked on them the other day, and reflected on the perfect angle of the sun, ambient temperature, and humidity that coincided to create that miracle.

We depend on natural gas for heating, cooking, and the clothes dryer. That bill is $51 per month. That’s our comfort bill; they usually refund us a few dollars each year.

I post all of this because finding comparisons with others help put it all in context. When I complained to a friend about my water bill late last summer, they revealed that their bill that month was three times as much. Their house is larger by a thousand square feet, but it also has two occupants (and a smaller yard). They did have company stay with them that month.

Overall, my gas, water, and electric bills are not not bad. Hell, on reflection, I spend more on coffee in a month than I do on water or electricity. Food, though…

Well, that’s another post.

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