Hot and Muggy!

Well, the power and water bills showed up at once yesterday. Not too bad: the electric was only $176.63 The water came in a dollar over budget at $126.42, but at least it didn’t out-zing than the power bill, as it did last month.

When it gets to be over 100 degrees, you have to water the potted plants every day. The roses, of which I have way too many, also need to be watered several times a week. And ohhh yeah: yesterday’s water bill also reflects the day I forgot and left the water running in the pool! Dumb tax!

So far, we’ve had a pretty temperate summer…only one 115-degree day. Now, though, we’re headed into monsoon season. At 5:30 this morning it was 90 degrees out there, and overcast. The air conditioning was roaring away when I awoke…had to jack it up to 85 to settle it down. Yuck. It’s hot and wet outdoors. This is the only really uncomfortable season in Arizona, and it will last through to the end of August.

That means the really big power bill is yet to come. The $175 is for June, a relatively cool month. The 115-degree day, when the A.C. thumped along alllll daayyyyyy long almost without stopping, occurred in July. The bill for that (and for most of the really hot and humid days) won’t come until next month. The past few days have seen the shaded back-porch thermometer at 110, and the unit has been running pretty much continuously all day long, except in the morning, when I shut it off until I can’t stand the heat any longer.

By comparison, last July’s power bill was $165.78, ten bucks less than this month’s gouge. Salt River Project, our power provider, has jacked up its rates. I forget exactly how much they managed to wangle out of the corporation commission. They tried to get an increase of 8.8%, but as I recall they dropped it, in the face of shrieks from customers, to 4.9%. That would’ve raised this year’s July bill to $174. Since I’ve kept the temps around 85 during the day—it has to go down to 78 or 80 at  night, or I can’t sleep at all—that means that even at uncomfortable temps the power bill continues to move toward unaffordable.

There’s no way to compare the water bill with last year’s, because the City of Phoenix screwed up the billing by canceling my service when someone gave them the wrong address to close out their own service. In July 2008, I had a $127 water bill. I wouldn’t be surprised but what the actual bill in 2010 was somewhere near that. In January the City also jacked up its rates, by 7.2% (!). I expect the fact that this month’s bill didn’t rise to $136, even after I almost overflowed the pool one fine day, reflects the savings realized from cutting down the endlessly thirsty, moribund ash tree.

Despite my intermittent bitching about it, the pool has earned its keep this year.

Earlier this season, I discovered that ten or fifteen minutes of paddling around in the pool really made the sore arm feel better. A lot better. So lately I’ve been setting the kitchen timer to go off every two hours, to force myself to get up off my duff and drop into the pool. While the injury is not healed and probably never will fully heal, it certainly is much improved. At least I’m not waking up in acute pain every morning, and I can now move the arm into most positions where it needs to go without too sharp a jab.

This has led me to rediscover what I’d long ago forgotten: the way I managed to  keep the power bills down in the gigantic, leaky house my ex- and I occupied was by staying wet all day. I used to shut off the AC the minute the man walked out of the house, and it would stay off until around 5:00 p.m.; because he got home around 6:30, the house would be cool by the time he came in from work. This was tolerable for me because I would run out to the pool about once an hour. In those days, I wore a swim suit and my hair hung down to my shoulders, and so my clothes and hair were damp almost all the time.

And that’s how you survive two months of 110-degree weather without bankrupting yourself. 😉

Image: Filamentary plasma in the sun’s chromosphere. NASA. Public domain.