Sunday morning stuff

Well, I guess we’re having weather this morning. It’s not pelting the side of the house, so the storm hasn’t wound itself up to its full potential yet. Still plenty wet out. I’ll just keep telling myself that April showers bring May flowers.  Maybe torrents and deluges bring even more flowers. Hopefully not a flood to my basement, though.

The Boston Globe delivery guy dropped my paper off at the end of the driveway this morning. It apparently was too tempting for someone and they rifled through it and ran off with all the coupon inserts. It’s certainly not the first time and I wouldn’t mind all that much if whoever does it would put the paper back into the plastic wrapper. I have a very soggy newspaper this morning. And that’s not the first time either. More like another occurrence in a long string of them. My paper won’t be readable for several hours. I think I’ll cancel delivery this week. It’s spring now (sort of) and I don’t need newspapers for starting the wood stove any longer. My newspaper is always dry and intact when I go pick one up at the store, too.
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As part of my ongoing series of pretty graphs depicting my electricity usage, here is the current one for March. More for my benefit than anyone else’s probably. But when I plunk them here, I can always find them. And I do so enjoy looking at progress. I used more last month than the previous month, but the lad was also home with a friend for a week. Kids can burn through electricity without half trying. (They also use a lot of water, I noticed.) That means summer use is going to be a challenge. One of my first lines of defense will be a clothesline.

A friend was over the day I opened my electric bill and she wondered how bad the damages were. I told her I owed $42.38 this month. Her jaw dropped nearly to the floor and she said, “How do you do that? Mine was $300 and change!” I think my jaw did hit the floor on that one. Holy cow, that’s a lot of electricity use.

She wondered what I did to make my bill so low and I told her some of what I’ve done. I offered to help her whittle away at hers if she’d like. But no, I guess not. She doesn’t want to mess with fluorescent light bulbs nor power strips for shutting things off. I think that is a rather common attitude, actually. Life is busy enough as it is without adding another layer of busy-ness to it.

At some point we won’t have a choice, but convincing people who don’t really wanna be convinced is hard. Even when they have the incentive to save a couple hundred dollars a month. It’s not something that has to be accomplished all in one month. It takes some time to incorporate new little habits into one’s daily routine. But, doing one new little thing every couple of months makes a difference and it’s not time consuming nor difficult. Getting people to change anything can be pretty daunting. Even with the offer of help and a guaranteed savings.