More crazy bills, one right after another. What is it about extra expenses that causes them to cluster in the season when your regular costs are at their highest?
The water bills are in low orbit. The power bills are just below them, hovering in the stratosphere. In another month I get to pay for yet another nuisance emissions test and fork up some more money to register the car.
Soooo…. Last week M’hijito and I had to cough up $370 apiece to get a gigantic tree in his front yard trimmed back. Almost eight hundred bucks is a helluva lot better than the $2400 fine we’d have to pay to the city if the garbage truck drivers complained about the way the thing was taking over the planet. It was not only trying to consume the neighbor’s front yard, it was radically in violation of the city right-of-way code.
Naturally, a few days later he had some strange health episode that sent him to the ER — allergic reaction, apparently. It subsided before they could start drugging him up, but that visit will cost him $500, the full deductible on his health insurance.
On my part, this tree-hacking bill came right after a $350 brake job and car maintenance bill.
And now it’s time to get the accursed palm trees trimmed. Early each summer, Mexican fan palms sprout these huge, spiny flower fronds. They look sort of like plant fireworks. And they drop tiny, sharp, POOL-CLOGGING blossoms into the water. With them come long stringy things that choke Harvey the Hayward Pool Cleaner and these hideous white grubs that live up in the trees. Don’t know what these three-inch-long worms are, but they get stuck in the skimmer and pump pot baskets and are absolutely gross to clean out. Ugh!
So Gerardo and his guys are here this morning. They were supposed to show up around noon, but today Gerardo decided to invert the mañana principle and appear at 7:30. This was smart on his part — the heat has yet to come up; by noon it will be killing.
However, choir has to sing at a wedding to day. I have to be out of here in half an hour. My hair was up in curlers when he surfaced, and my face still isn’t painted, and I have NO IDEA how much to pay him.
On that note, come to think of it…I’d better start running. Again.
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Wah! WRONG DATE! Fortunately I realized before racing out the door to the Cult HQ that I entered the wedding on the wrong date. Otherwise I’d be even more ridiculous than I usually am.
Okay. This gives mit the entire freaking day to amuse myself and clean the palm tree mess out of the pool. Heh…probably cleaning the pool is gonna take the entire freaking day, too…
🙄 😆 🙄
Wow, that’s an expensive tree trim! Did you try to DIY before calling in a professional? Maybe I’m just cheap, haha. Summer is so expensive.
Out of the question. It’s a 50-year-old carob tree that probably hasn’t been trimmed in 10 or 15 years. At 68, I’m not up for climbing into a tree that’s higher than the house and wider than a large front yard, carrying a chainsaw with me. And we have no truck with which to haul the debris to the landfill. Nor do we own a chipper.
Interestingly, this was the low bid.
It’s been cooler than normal, and we’ve also had a fair amount of rain here in Michigan, meaning that so far the electric and water usage is way lower than what it had been. We also had a new roof done and the roofer said that our lack of proper attic ventilation was likely causing the house to be hotter than it should and said that our A/C usage will likely fall a bit during the hot spells.
Good gravy, troubles (expenses) really do come in those ridiculous clumps, don’t they? Ours seem to come approximately once a year. This year’s the refi that’s going to take a big fat chunk of cash down (voluntarily but painfully). I’m sort of squinting at everything else.