One year ago today: October 14, 2016, that oak flooring.
Five years ago today: October 14, 2012, first in six years!
Nine years ago today: October 14, 2008, getting settled in.
Random years ago today: October 14, 2013, test drive the cPod.
Wow, as a professional accountant (ret’d) I thought I’d seen intentionally confusing statements before. You know, (Florida SunTrust) but never in my born days have I seen anything like the electric statements of Lakeland, Florida. The ancient accounting formula of BB + TI – TO = EB falls to pieces when you start dealing with the level of incompetents found this deep in Florida. It’s where the sleaziest of civil servants hide from oversight committees and things like GAAP (generally accepted accounting principles). My favorite has to be where the department that enters the bill is separate from the somewhat less motivated area that records the payments.
[Author’s note: here’s your mystery picture for today. Any idea what it is? When I first saw it, I imagined using it on the people who think that creating stupid billing statements and bank balances. And the people at the DMV, don’t forget the people at the DMV. But that’s your hint. It is not a Korean torture device. It has to do with something mentioned later in today’s posting, so keep reading.]
My connection with the matter is new-found knowledge that everybody around me is paying $200 to $300 per month for electricity. No exceptions, and that includes people who got their houses insulated. Although often it was spray insulation, where I stripped my walls to the studs and did the job properly. The houses studied were half again larger than mine on average. The occupants stated that same as myself, they did not air condition rooms of the house that were not in use. They provided copies of their utility bills for me to examine. That’s where things got strangely interesting. I saw the increase in usage based on the number of occupants. I don’t know if it is a minimum billing, but a single person appears to use 5,000 gallons of water per month.
It’s when that second person arrived that the bills really soared. Remember folks, this is only a correlation, but it is a strong one. I calculated in one instance that the extra person, based on water usage and the electricity to heat it, took the equivalent of 420 showers. I know that is ridiculous, but I can point to a very distinct pattern, and it sure looks like cause and effect. What’s worse, many of the cities purchase their power from Florida Power and Light and Duke Electric, at a discount, then resell it to the residents, adding on several hefty fees and a tax on the electricity, get this, based on water usage.
So you’ll know, I pay around $80 per month for electric and $60 for all other services like water, sewer, and garbage pickup. I leave my air conditioner on all the time in the bedroom so I always have one comfy spot to walk into. I have a fan, sometimes two, in every room.
You’ll figure it out.
Remember to use BACK ARROW to return to blog.
Next item on the agenda concerns making money. I took my early retirement (the government one) and it begins in two months. I’d always planned to have an alternate source of income, but only under some very strict rules, such as minimal or no inventory, no business license, and as far as possible, cash only. But that just describes 99% of the illegal immigrant operations from here to Los Angeles. Hence, Agt. R and I had an extra meeting to find out the areas where we can compete and what advantages we have. Not many, but here is the top of the list:
1) A large empty room at his house.
2) Vast experience at office management.
3) His truck and large work sheds.
4) A thousand dollars per month operating capital.
5) An awful lot of new, well-maintained tools.
Of course, we have all sundry other gear, like computers, cameras, desks, phones, and operational savvy, but these are a standard catalog of assets that we, wisely I think, do not rate as advantages. How this ties in is one of the electricity bills examined was from his house and I made the comment a month ago that he could make more money running a business from that large room than from renting it out. He had a tenant, but was also suffering that inexplicable $40-some per week higher expenses. On average, adding one person per household per month is the dollar equivalent of an extra 4,225 gallons of electrically heated hot water. (Or as I put it at the time, 420 hot showers.) Ergo, the rented room was netting him less than $45 per week and not worth the inconvenience. We could make five times that [much] selling firewood out of there.
This left me with a lot to think about. There is a large secondary market of used furniture and flea market merchandise operating all over Florida. We’ve looked at this before in a similar context. So has the federal government, but that’s a separate issue. To date, the only thing we’ve sold on-line was that hospital bed via Craigslist. I’ve not forgotten that thrift store out near Mulberry, or the increasing number of storage locker auctions and estate sales in these troubled times. No doubt we would be real contenders if we took on that market, but right now, I’m grabbing an extra coffee break.
Ah, coffee, the brew of choice for me. Now restricted to three cups per day, I’m reading this article that claims the Internet has changed the dating habits of America. I say claims, because there is some fiddling with the statistics. It delves into how people meet, and of course, advertising always helps. There were graphs purporting to show a decline in meetings through friends, bars, work, and church. All the curves went down since 2002 except for a slight uptick since 2014 of people meeting again in bars. Say, isn’t that the year JZ and I went chasing women in Ft. Myers Beach? Anyway, the corresponding curve of people meeting on-line upsurged 20% for opposite sex couples. I thought, why are they specifying “opposite”?
Got it, they needed it as a springboard to bring queers into the conversation. During the same period, meetups between same sex couples was up 68%. Like I said, advertising helps. That’s when I figured out what the article was really getting at. Not marriages or relationships, but encounters. Big difference. It’s the old liberal line again, that queers are just the same as the rest of us, which is nonsense. (Hey, libturds, here’s a statistic for you: The divorce rate among my socks is astonishing.) Providing an anonymous medium for society’s less than mainstream types to broadcast their wares hardly counts in most people’s books as either an improvement or a fundamental shift in social habits. For the minority, it’s less like coming out of a closet and more like coming off the washroom walls.
“She was ugly
but we had no vodka left.”
~ a Russian, I’ll bet.
First, here is a picture for the human interest element out there. It’s the momma-cat from the house next door to the other place. Six kittens, she was starving. So we fed her back to what you see here. I fed her sliced chicken parts, ground pork, and left a dish of dry food for her in the garage, where she can get a little relaxation by the King Edward sign, complete with bullet holes. (The sign, Patsie, not the cat.) Remember, you see these things here first, then they go on to become tales from the trailer court. And momma-cat gets a well-deserved moment of peace and quiet. Awww . . .
It is billed as “warrant proof” and I’ll be examining it soon. Not that the authorities ever bothered with warrants much, and their mouthpiece (some guy named Rosenstien?) is claiming that law enforcement is being thwarted by this development. Right. How are the police supposed to catch the few bad guys if they can’t listen in on everybody’s phone calls? How can they do their job if they are forced to actually act like everybody is presumed innocent? For those who don’t know, every cellular telephone call is permanently recorded. This is a severe invasion of privacy and everyone should ask why they are doing it. But complacency is the rule in every nation where the majority are addicted to television.
Not myself a Snapchat user, I view that technology as a reactionary mass movement by teens who finally grasp the extent to which they are being monitored electronically. Wasn’t it Time magazine that suggested they have become aware of their personal need for on-line security? “Emotional security”, they called it, mind you, in my opinion the teen’s concern is for the wrong reasons. I suspect the lure of Snapchat is how the message disappears. (It is still recorded somewhere.) The teens are reacting to the cyberbullying, trolling, and the threat of permanent career damage created by Facebook and the general wholesale profiling by the sinister telemarket thugs. Sadly, that is not a legitimate concern for privacy; it is more a self-centered “leave me alone” behavior. At least privacy is finally beginning to gain traction against the worst of the on-line abuses.
Isn’t it paradoxical how the people who clandestinely invade your privacy the most, the telemarket companies, are the ones who operate in the most secrecy? They live and work underground, they would rather you not know they exist. Quick, name me one owner of a telemarket company. Can’t do it. These people are totally hush-hush creepy.
ADDENDUM
The house continues to settle back to level since I raised that far northwestern corner. Recollect I noticed how the doors no longer swing shut by themselves. Since a few days ago, all the doorknobs and latches started working again. I used to walk around the house just elbowing the doors open. Now I have to stop and turn the knobs. And this includes the doors at the opposite end of the building, in fact, that’s where I first notice it. That’s a novel experience for me. Makes it bloggable.
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