Utility Bills and other stuff

We got our electric utility bill yesterday. August and September are usually our highest bills of the year because of the heat. A typical summer month usually costs us about $200-$250 and in the winter it is about $80. In our September bill, they estimated our usage from the previous month since they could not come out and read meters due to the storm. They estimated our bill at about half of what our previous month was, so our bill was around $100.

Yesterday I opened our October bill for the past month's use since we have been home and it was $476. Talk about sticker shock. Apparently they grossly underestimated last month, or there is something seriously wrong with our bill. According to our bill, our usage for the past two months (including the estimated month) was 5335 units, which averages 2667 units per month. This is on par with our July usage of 2690 units. But then where is the two weeks where we used no power at all? Our usages should have been MUCH lower. ....Unless, of course, there is a grow room in my house that I don't know about.

We are not the only ones with a bill like this. There is a whole story about it in the paper this morning in the article titled, "Utility Bills Back with a Vengeance". All I can say is "Ugh!!" At least the phone company didn't charge us for all the time the phones were out.


Our mortgage company finally returned our insurance check to us. They decided to make it easy for us and just endorse it and release the entire thing to us without forcing us to go through the song and dance of their inspectors, etc. Unfortunately they FORGOT to put the endorsement on the back of the check when they returned it in the pre-paid Fed-ex envelope I sent them! They said they would pay to have it overnighted to us because of their error, but I don't have much confidence in them after they "forgot" to do the very thing for which I sent the check in the first place, so I didn't take any chances. I sent another pre-paid Fed-ex envelope. I don't want them to "accidentally" put it in First Class mail which will take about two weeks to get here and probably get lost.


In other updates, my friend Jeannie has been getting contractors to come do estimates on their roof and all of the drywall in their house, and for the mold removal. Unfortunately since they could not get back into the house for 3 weeks, the mold damage is pretty severe. Her husband Mike had to go buy a regulator to breathe through since he seems to be very allergic to all the mold. Those regulator masks are very popular in New Orleans right now, and did you know that mold comes in every color of the rainbow?


The fencing company I called a few weeks ago finally came to give me an estimate for our fence. Jeannie and I are both discovering that the longer it takes to get the contractors to your house, the more the prices go up. I guess materials and labor are in short supply because of all the rebuilding.


Finally, here's an update on the Grave Tragedy that I wrote about last month. They have returned the tombs to their proper resting place at last in this story, TALES OF THE CRYPTS. Here's a photo from the paper. I couldn't find the photo on the newspaper's website, so this will have to do:.