Monday, June 22, 2009

Being Frugal And A Few Other Things

It's been very hot here! I guess that's to be expected since it's almost the end of June. I really hate the thought of having a big electric bill. I think we are pretty good when it comes to not being wasteful with the electric and gas. In times like this I think that's pretty much a necessity. As I mentioned before we block of the other rooms and just use the AC for the living room and kitchen. At night we turn on the AC in our bedroom and turn the other one off. I've been hanging out most of the laundry. We've replaced about 3/4 of the light bulbs with those energy efficient bulbs. As you know they are quite expensive. For just one ceiling fan in the living room it was $15 for 5 of those bulbs. We did get the pointy ones instead of the round ones because they look a lot better and OK....I'm picky. Lets see....what else? We keep the blinds closed and the heavy lined drapes closed in the living room during the day because keeping the sun out keeps it cooler. It really does help. Now for gas. I take a barely warm shower. Who needs to take a steaming hot shower when it's in the 90's out? We don't even run the dishwasher every day and wait till it's full. I wash most of the laundry with cold water but Russell has to wash his uniforms with hot water in order to get the oil out of them. I'm sure there are lots of other little things we do but we could do better. I'm bad about leaving my computer on. Then there's that phantom energy thing where appliances you are not even using use up energy. Things like TVs, DVD players, microwaves etc use energy even whey they are not being used. It is suggested turning these off when not in use but that seems like it would be a pain. We may have to do it if the bill is higher than I'm expecting. So....what are you doing to save energy?

My new clothesline
Keep the temp at a decent temperature in the house instead of really low as long as it's still comfortable
Works has been rather uneventful. Well....yesterday I'd only been at my register about 5 minutes when a toddler barfed all over the floor in front of my register. Maintenance was called but took too long so the Mom cleaned it up with the cleaning supplies I gave her. Maintenance got there just as she was finishing. Oh yeah and a pregnant woman was lying on the ground outside after passing out. I guess she was OK and they took her to her vehicle in a wheelchair as she refused medical treatment. Wacky, Psycho girl who I may or may not have mentioned before got fired. She was really paranoid and she was so odd that whenever she checked out at my register and other ones she wanted her clothing all triple bagged and then all put in one big bag. They were watching her and every time she checked out we had to make a duplicate receipt after she left. One time I was in the break room sitting down and she came in and sit next to me and said.....I'm sorry I harassed you. It's illegal you know. Huh? I had no idea what she was talking about and she was so creepy that I moved to the other side of the room. Another time in the rest room I was washing my hands and then getting paper towels and she practically knocked me out of the way to get some for herself. She got fired for a rather strange incident but there were so many complaints against and they had just had it with her. There were some people buying infants clothes and that was the dept. she worked in and she kept going over to the things they were looking at and trying to straighten things out so they could not even pick out anything. She was saying....excuse me....I need to fix these things. So they went to get management and that was the end of the story.

I took out all the stitches to the blanket I'm making and made it smaller. It was way too large for a throw to just put over a chair so now I won't need as much yarn. Now it won't cost so much to make two matching throws.

Knitting progressGarden progress

It sure is a small world. When I came home from work late last night Russell was across the street helping some new neighbors work on a vehicle. As it turns out their son use to hang around with Russell's youngest son who used to live here with us. We heard all about their adventures.....or I should say how they skipped school all the time and the trouble they got in. We were clueless to this at the time. Well not really....we knew he was misbehaving, we just couldn't prove it. We heard of one incident where the two boys (Russell's son and his friend) were skipping school and this boy's mother was hunting all over for them for 2 hours and found them in our backyard hiding in the cabin of Russell's boat. Crazy huh? But not at all unexpected.

2 comments:

  1. You can't really do much to stop kids skipping school. Sometimes you may be able to find the reason and fix the problem, but without actually making sure the kid is escorted everywhere (which isn't an option, and will probably cause more problems) there's no way to guarantee that he or she will go to and stay in school.

    Anyway...

    We tried the turning things off at the wall when not in use thing. yes, it saves a bit on electric, but - in my opinion - not really enough to compensate for the rise in tempers when people forget and go to use something that would normally be left turned on at the wall. Not to mention the confusion when trying to figure out which thing you're meant to turn on.

    We do try with other things though. We now have an indoor airer, so we don't use a tumble dryer (it's the washing line or the airer). We try other ways of cooling down (or getting warm) before worrying about fans or heating (we don't have ac). We've switched to environmentally friendly cleaners, which - apart from being free from many of the chemicals in the other ones - seem to last longer, which saves us some money. And we've got some of those energy saver light bulbs too. There are probably others, but those are the main ones.

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  2. I left a comment previously - but blogger crashed and I didn't know if it had been saved or not.

    Oh well. I am glad the WalMart Whacko is no long working with you - and you had some excitement, with the baby throwing up and the pregnant lady fainting. I guess you see someone keel over every now and then.

    I'm doing much like you are, pulling the drapes and curtains closed and keeping the AC set where it basically just keeps the humidity out of the air. I don't mind warm near as much as I mind sticking to the desktop and drinkign glasses sweating all over the place.

    Boys will be boys - And those boys are sure creative! Hiding in the cabin of a boat. Ingenious!

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