Judy has a bad knee. Her left one. We’re going to get an MRI on it next week, and probably surgery after that. She’s getting her right shoulder looked at as well. She had surgery on that shoulder ten years ago to repair a torn rotator cuff. It may need more attention. Yesterday we were walking along and Judy suddenly just fell. Her right foot stayed where it was and everything else went to the ground. She fell off her ankle. At the time, I thought she had blown out her left knee all the way, but she blew the ankle instead. Today, the ankle is sore and swollen. We went to the Island Clinic to get it X-rayed and diagnosed. Nothing broken. Second degree sprain. We got a double-wrap foot bandage and Advil for it. Our charming son-in-law wants to know when a person just gets declared “Totaled”. I told him not to worry, I kept the receipt. Now he wants to know if I got the extended warranty. Parts are falling off faster than we can glue them back on. We need some of those Mister Potatohead parts. When they fall off, you can just pick them up and stick them back on about where they’re supposed to go.
Energy Crisis
The next phase of the adventure will begin when we try to settle our bill with the Electric Company. The guy that measured the accuracy of our meter is not affiliated with the Electric Company; he is independent of them. He writes up his report and sends it on to them. They should have it by now. The meter checker concluded that our meter was running at 158% of normal. It’s good to have agreement that our electric meter was crazy, but we may not agree on the quantity of error. That 158% does not even begin to explain the 4,500 kilowatt hours of electricity per month we’ve been charged for. We had to be off by a factor of 5 or 10. Even if we agreed on the amount of error, how far back do you go to adjust the billing? We don’t have anything that tells us when the meter went bad, or how bad it was when. Two years ago, Judy was telling me we should change electric companies because our bill was higher than everyone else’s. My response was that there are multiple electric companies in competition here. Is it likely that one company’s charge per kilowatt hour is going to me materially different from another company’s charge? Electricity is a commodity. One company couldn’t afford to charge a higher rate than the other companies or everyone would just switch to the other companies. It never occurred to me that we might have a mismeasurement of our usage. We’ve probably had a bad meter, getting progressively worse, for at least the last two years; maybe even since they installed it five years ago! We suppose the Electric Company has a lot more experience figuring out this sort of thing than we do. Since we now know that electric meters *can* go bad, surely we’re not the only people who have had that happen. The Electric Company will have experience sorting it out. We’ll see what they come up with before we protest too much. Maybe they know how to settle this fairly.
Fountain Rock
We brought back a rock from the Valley. It’s a really cool rock. So cool, in fact, we paid for it.
It fits right in front of the spilling pot fountain.
Looks like it’s always been there.
Energy Crisis
The Electric Company was billing us faster than we could pay. We’ve been terrible energy hogs; even when we aren’t here. We used 4,500 kilowatt hours of electricity in one month. We asked neighbors about their usage. While we were using 4,000, they were using 400. We went outside and watched the (virtual) disk on our electric meter spinning way faster than it should. Repeated calls to the Electric Company got a guy out to test the meter today. The meter didn’t pass the test. We have a new meter. In the first half day since, we’ve used 4 kilowatt hours. That’s more like it. Crisis resolved.
Enrique lives!
We had that record cold snap in January. The temperatures dropped into the twenties and stayed for a while. Too cold for many of the plants here; many didn’t make it. It looked to be too cold for Enrique as well; all his leaves turned brown and dried up. No more juice in those leaves. We thought we were going to have to replace Enrique when we got back from The Valley, but no! While we were gone, a new leaf sprouted. Who cares if all the old leaves are dead if Enrique can sprout new ones?
Yeaa. Enrique lives.