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Waste, waste, waste
Since the lad has been home, our electricity usage has gone up quite significantly. December involved Christmas lights and those little things eat up electricity like nobody’s business. But it was something I was willing to consume, although I’d still prefer one spotlight and lots of greenery. I’m still working on my neighbor to go with that idea one of these years. I was less careful with the lights than I was last year, but still more conservative than my neighbor wanted to be. She argued for leaving them on from dusk through 10:00 at night. I suggested 6:00 until 8:30. That’s what I did last year and it didn’t go over so well. We compromised and lit them at 4:30 and left them on until 9:00. And, of course, having an extra computer and a television for DVDs and instant Netflix viewing have added up. Also...I plugged the dorm refrigerator back in. I seem to live quite well without a fridge for most of the year. But with the lad’s cooking frenzy, we needed to keep some things cold. This winter has provided natural freezing, however. I stuck a cooler on the back porch and since the temps have rarely (like two or three times) gone above freezing, everything in it stays frozen solid.
There are days, however, when things go remarkably awry. When I checked the electric meter today, I was floored to note that we’d used nearly 12 kilowatt hours of electricity yesterday. I haven’t used that much in well over a year. I shouldn’t have been floored, really.
This morning I discovered the refrigerator door ajar. And I didn’t notice until this afternoon that the back porch light was still on from our wood fetching foray last night. Just about every appliance in the house was still on standby mode because I neglected to make the rounds to shut them all off before I went to bed last night. That drives me crazy. And on top of that, I discovered that my electric blanket was on when I went to bed last night. It must have been on for most of the day. Abbie apparently stepped on the control button. I have a hard and fast rule that the blanket goes on a half an hour before I go to bed to make it toasty and then I shut it off. Abbie evidently doesn’t appreciate my rule. I’m sure it wasn’t on purpose, but I am also sure that she especially enjoyed lounging on my bed all day yesterday. I should have been suspicious when she was on top of the quilt rather than underneath it. I’ve since moved the control out of her reach.
Yesterday really did little more than reflect enormous waste. I’m struck by how easily it happened, too. A little less vigilance than normal messed up my figures for the entire month. Nuts.