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If you enjoy pets, especially dogs, don’t miss these incredible photos of Finnegan the Border Collie. Found at Midlife, Menopause, Mistakes and Random Stuff, one of Frugal Scholar‘s fave sites.

Wow! The power bill arrived in the mail today: $257.82!!! For one little old lady, living by herself, in a sweltering hot house. That’s a $28.28 increase over last year’s bill, when I had a plain old manual thermostat. And I most certainly did not swelter miserably all through last July.

A couple of months ago, I switched out the manual thermostat for a programmable one, seeking the alleged savings. Come May, the first post-programmable power bill came in: fifty bucks higher than the May 2009 bill!

Well, maybe I wasn’t using it right. Maybe I was asking it to keep the indoor temperature too low? So I reset it:  82 during the day and 76 at night. And I put Gerardo up to hauling the freezer from the garage to a bedroom that serves as storage, where it wouldn’t run nonstop 24/7. This evinced a June statement that was $36 under the June 2008 bill. Ah, thought I: now we’re cookin’ with gas! (Thank gawd: If I had to boil a pot of water on an electric stove, I’d be brewing coffee over a camp stove under the Seventh Avenue Overpass!)

Encouraged by the apparent savings, I decided it really isn’t necessary for the temp to be 76 all night: if it would just drop low enough for me to get to sleep, probably a two-degree increase wouldn’t wake me up (not true, as it develops). So, pursuing another price cut, I set the thermostat to run at 82 from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. (at 82, BTW, because the thermostat is located in the coolest part of the house, the rooms where I actually live are around 85 or 90). Then it drops to 78 between 5:00 p.m. and 10:30, when I would normally go to bed. Between 10:30 p.m. and 12:30 a.m., it goes down to 76. Then at 12:30 in the morning it rises back to 78, where it hovers until 9:00 a.m.

Result: a $50 kick in the pants.

And a spate of insomnia. Truth is, with the thermostat set at 78 degrees, the bedroom—conveniently, the warmest room in the house—is too damn hot to sleep. At first I thought, when I woke up sweating at three in the morning, that I must be having a relapse of the hot flashes. But then I realized…waitaminit! The dog is awake, too, and the dog is sitting here panting! Dog panting. Human panting. Neither critter sleeping. It’s not “just me.”

Man oh man! When Salt River Project engages its outrageous 8.8 percent increase, that will push my summer power bills to almost $300!!!!! Where on earth is the money gunna come from?

I guess this is just another message that I need to sell this house and get into someplace smaller that doesn’t have a pool. Just what I need to do: uproot myself at the same time I’m losing my  job.

Well, I’m going to try SRP’s time-of-day service—around here you have to sign up for it: the power company doesn’t just raise and lower bills for any Tom, Dick, and Harry. As a practical matter, I normally do the laundry in the morning (especially in the summer: the garage, where the washer & dryer are located, is hotter than a bygod), and the pool pump runs from 4:00 a.m. to about 10 a.m., well within the off-peak hours.

Three problems with this scheme: first, you have to leave the gate to your backyard unlocked, decidedly an unwise strategy in this part of town; and second, they nick you an extra three bucks on the service fee, cutting into any savings you might (or might not) get on the plan.

And the biggest issue: the rate in the summer peak time of day is almost twice the all-day rate on the basic plan, while the off-peak saving is only about 4 cents per kilowatt-hour. And of course, the peak time of day is the hottest time of day…and the biggest power guzzler is a central air conditioner.

SRP also offers a cost-averaging plan, whereby the company divides the total of your last year’s bills by twelve. Last time I asked, this would have given me a monthly bill of $125, a far cry from the the $63 that’s typical during the winter. A hundred and a quarter is too darned much to have to fork over every month! I’d rather strain my budget three or four months a year and have eight or nine months with affordable bills, thank you.

At any rate, we now have two months of three in which bills are significantly higher with the programmable thermostat than they were with a regular round dial that I could turn off and leave turned off until I just couldn’t stand it any more…and which ran the system at 76 all night long instead of just two hours. Not very impressive!

For all the good it does, GDU’s six months of furlough days have finally come to an end. They effectively docked us a day of pay for each pay period; so we’re finally going to see that amount back in our paychecks.

Cleverly, they timed this so that two of the paychecks this month, the so-called “extra” paycheck month, are shorted a day’s pay. So we’re shorted on the pretend “extra” paycheck.

For me, this de facto pay cut has amounted to $130 per payday—that is, $260 a month. Because I soon adjusted to the cut-back budget, it really hasn’t made much difference for me. So, now that we have this money “back”—temporarily, in my case, since in five months I’ll have no paycheck at all—I’m going to transfer that $260 of “found money” (well…”refound” money) directly to savings. That’ll be useful: it’ll put another $1,300 into my retirement “cushion.” More than that: we get two paychecks in August, and the newly plumped up check that landed in my account yesterday is dated July 31: $1,430.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve always put $200 a month in savings. When I paid off the Renovation Loan, I had the credit union add the amount of the loan payments to the monthly automatic transfer into savings. All told, the current automatic transfer is $404 a month. Add another $260, and we end up with $664/month of routine cash flow going straight to savings. Hm. That’ll be $3,320 by December 31.

Money happens, eh?

At the downtown house, Richard, intrepid proprietor of Dick’s Landscaping, has set his crew to ripping out the neglected debris and broken sidewalks that are the front and back yards and installing a minimalist desert landscape, the least we can get by with and still end up with a pleasing, low-water, low-maintenance yard. Dick’s has done the landscaping for my present home and for the last house I lived in, and in both cases they did a top-flight job.

I was going to have Gerardo do this, but given his tendency to show up whenever he feels like it and his taste in shady employees, I thought better of it. One of us would have had to be present at all times to be sure they didn’t do something goofy, and neither of us can be away from our jobs for a week or two…especially when part of that week or two is likely to be spent waiting for him to not appear on the job. Gerardo would have been a lot cheaper, but you get what you pay for.

On the other hand…  God Herself would have done the work for less than Richard charges. I managed to get him to come down $1,000 off his original bid, but despite the fact that AMEX charges him 11 percent for the privilege of letting me rack up the $12,000 price on my card, he wouldn’t give us a discount if we paid in cash.

Yeah, you read that right: Twelve grand. It’s actually cheap, believe it or not. You can expect to spend upwards of $20,000 to install desert landscaping in a yard that’s already infested with grass. M’hijito and I will split the cost 50-50. By putting it on my American Express card and paying it off in cash at the end of the month, we’ll “earn” (snark!) a munificent $120 kickback from AMEX, nothing like a 5 or 10 percent discount off Richard’s fee. Oh well. It’s better than a whack upside the head. Marginally.

Drawing $6,000 out of my credit-union savings account will avoid having to create a taxable event to get my hands on the cash, but it will drop my short-term emergency fund to $1,100, something that I don’t like at all. Well—not literally: that’s the balance after withholding $2,500 for to cover COBRA between canning day and my 65th birthday. If we’re wildly lucky and the State of Arizona doesn’t screw its employees on health insurance this fall (a very long shot, indeed: with the legislature balancing its budget on the backs of our children and the State’s lowest-paid workers, you can be sure the screwing will be deep and thorough), the discounted COBRA actually will be less than Medicare will cost me. So I should be able to cover that from cash flow. That means the post-landscaping emergency fund will actually amount to about $3600.

Between now and December 30 I will deposit another $2,020 into that account from my regular paychecks. And if my figures are right, I should net about $5,000 from the community college moonlighting. So that will bring the actual canning-day fund to $10,620, more than enough to serve as the cushion I believe I’ll need during the lean summer months. Even if I have to spend the $2,500 on COBRA, as I expect will happen, enough will be left to get by.

And that’s a conservative figure. We get a so-called “extra” paycheck this month; that will add another $1,000 to savings. And if somehow I can make GDU pay my back vacation pay in my last paycheck (apparently they’re supposed to do that, but I know they delayed paying it to My Bartleby for two or three pay periods after she left), that will be another $3,100 net, for a potential December 31 total of $14,720. Soooo…. I don’t feel too worried.

For our money, we will get a very large project done, with Richard and his foreman riding herd on the workmen instead of me having to do it. Also, at least one of these guys is a skilled mason—he built the courtyard in my front yard and did a gorgeous job of it. The plans include…

• Jackhammer out the decrepit walkway in front
• Shovel out all the parched bermudagrass and berserk weeds, front, back, both sides
• Remove a large volunteer lantana blocking the side gate
• Haul away the debris
• Grade the decrepit driveway
• Use our 15-cent-apiece bricks to build a patio around the front door and a pretty winding walkway from the patio to the street
• Build a low block wall around the new front patio; plaster and paint it; cap it with red brick to match the house
• Install two wrought-iron gates in this wall
• Plant a good-sized desert willow in front, to shade the living-room window
• Plant two bottle trees next to the west wall, to shade the westside master bedroom
• Build a brick patio outside the French doors we installed in the back bedroom
• Build a brick patio in the far northeast corner of the backyard, designed as a sitting area
• Brick another area for outdoor cooking, to accommodate two barbecue/smokers with space for a couple of cooks to play with their food
• Plant Sonoran emerald paloverdes to shade each of these patios
• Plant clump grasses and other easy-on-the-eyes ornamentals around the two sitting areas
• Plant a Mexican lime and a Texas ebony in back
• Build planting beds around the existing patio and along the back wall
• Install drip-and-bubbler watering systems front and back
• Provide extra lines for us to connect drip lines as we wish to add new plantings in the future
• Lay down anti-weed fabric everywhere
• Lay down 75 tons of quarter-minus, front and back, also paving the driveway with quarter-minus

The only thing we had to cut to save the thousand bucks was the proposed flagstone walkway between the house and the back sitting area. This is something we can do ourselves, for a lot less than $1,000. Especially if we can work another estate sale bargain on the flags.

Could we do all this work ourselves and save about 60 percent of the cost?

Well…in a word, no. We could in theory do some of it. But most of it is way too heavy for us to manage, and although I’ve operated a tractor, neither of us knows how to operate a backhoe.

I have laid bricks, and I know how to build a serviceable patio. However, I was 25 when I built my last patio. I’m now almost 65. Do I really want to haul, spread, grade, and tamp several tons of sand and lay 1,500 bricks (and then some)? No. Could I even do it, at my age? Highly doubtful. Furthermore, I do not know how to build, plaster, and cap a block wall, and I don’t want to learn.

M’hijito works a truly miserable job that sends him home worn out, and so far he has shown no inclination nor talent for physical labor. As a practical matter, he’s not going to do it. So, to the extent it gets done, we either hire someone else to do it or his doddering mother and her campesino yard guy do it. I do not even want to think about the characters El Campesino is likely to trot in to spread 75 tons of quarter-minus and dig holes to plant six 24-gallon trees. Argh!

So: no, we could/would not do it ourselves. I think this project will be worth it in the long run, since one of us will be living in that house far into the foreseeable future.