“People keep asking me, “What should I do with my time?”"
- “So what do you tell them?”
—————
“Buy a set of encyclopedias.”
-Daniel Johnston
lol, I thought that was so funny. You can see it on YouTube (along with some other weird stuff).
So these two kids on skateboards came poking around the house being built next door. Pam had mentioned before seeing some kids taking wood from construction sites, so I watched them through the window. Sure enough, they eventually (after making sure the coast is clear) grabbed two long 2×4’s each and started heading off. So I burst into action!
“Hey, hey, hey!”… one kid (still grabbing some wood) stopped, and the other kid kept skating off (he had earphones on). So the one kid called after the other kid to come back… and I said, “Ya’ll can’t be taking this wood. These people paid for this wood to have their house built. If ya’ll really need some wood for a project or something, you should come back when they’re building the house and ask the construction workers if they have any extra pieces.” — “oh, ok.”
Lol, how old am I?! Doesn’t seem like THAT long ago that I’d probably be doing the same thing. ::sigh::
So I got a new e-bill from Reliant. After I had called (and written a blog post), I e-mailed them to see if sending in a picture of the meter would help solve the problem quicker. They said sure, and so I did, and their reply was “I can see how it (the thousandths place) could be read as a 9 and not an 8. We’ll go ahead and wait on the meter re-read.” I e-mailed back a pretty long and strong reply, making note to say I’m not upset with Randi (the guy I was emailing) but just with their policy’s and Reliant reluctance to just fix this. He sincerely apologized and said it would just be best to let it go through the procedure that happens in these cases.
Anyway, last month’s bill was $51.98, not $200 (I think they just subtracted 1,000kWh from last month’s reading)… so all is good again, lol. And now there’s probably almost enough money in there to pay next months too.
In other news, Dad’s back from touring with Daniel… that’s always nice. I’m up late again, not being able to sleep since I took too much sleep-aid last night and slept like 10 hours. Pam’s got her schedule down… like clock work, everyday around 8pm or 8:30pm, she is just out of energy and ready to hit the pillow. And every morning between 5am or 6am, she’s up and can’t sleep anymore. My schedule seems to be whenever.
Still need to do my taxes. I’ll definitely be getting an accountant next year. Getting married, buying a house, running a business, savings, retirement, insurance, using my home for work, blah, blah… just made everything like 3 times more complicated than last year. Lucky for me there’s a lot of articles out there about freelance accounting.
That’s all for now. I can’t wait to have some time to finish my personal websites, and setup a flickr stream or something. I have lots of photos to share, but it’s just too much work to get them up and out. Can’t wait for the mac version of Picasa!
So I got my latest electric bill today, which also happens to be my biggest one… despite the fact that it is the smallest billing period ever (26 days) with the lowest Avg. Daily Temperature (62F) ever in my 10 month history.
So I went to read my meter, and it looks like they just mis-read it by 1,000kWh. So I called them up (Reliant), and he asked me if I could just go read what it is now, and I already had… but he didn’t believe me. “That’s too low from what we’d expect, we’ll have to send someone out to re-read the meter. If our reading was correct, there will be a $6.00 re-read fee, otherwise it’ll be 30 - 45 days before the billing error is corrected.”
I tried to explain that it makes sense that this would be the LOWEST bill I’ve ever had, we’re not using our A/C, it was a short billing period, even the trend on the graphs they have show this should be lower. But somehow, this being the biggest bill in my (10 month) history, being almost double what last month was (35 days (9 days longer!) and 68F), makes more sense (even higher than any of the summer months!).
::sigh::
Oh well… I paid the amount I paid last month in the meantime.
So I’ve been using Google Apps for our main domain hihowareyou.com for one month now, and it’s caught 6,038 spam messages since. I don’t remember exactly, but I would guess only about 10 messages ever got through to the inbox that shouldn’t have. Pretty cool!
I’m using Google Apps for a lot of my other domains now, and with any new customer I have with the web business, they’ll be using it too. It’s so awesome to have my domain e-mail anywhere, along with shared calendar, contacts, etc.