Friday: Good and Otherwise

I have taught DD well :-)  She has even surpassed me in finding a good deals on textbooks. While wonderful Grandma is paying her tuition, DD will be paying for her own books. She got her list of textbooks and with all these "bundling" of textbooks, online access codes, work book,etc, it makes it hard to find this exact ISBN for sale anywhere but the expensive bookstore. But she persisted and at least found one of the bundled books online used. Bookstore wanted $130........she snagged it up for $13!  Four more weeks until she leaves for college life.

I just love her roommate and her mom! We had so much fun with them when they came for the weekend last April, then DD went and spent 4 days with them a few weeks ago and had a wonderful time. When they fly in for move-in day, roommate's mom has a hotel for a couple of nights. I was going to get a hotel for one night (after move-in, because I'll probably be too tired to want to spend 2 hours driving home after getting up early, driving up there 2 hours, going through  hours of move-in, etc) and roommate's mom offered to share her room with me that night.  Very sweet of her.


I am planning to try out my new sprayer and stain the arbors this weekend. I had already purchased the stain and sprayer a couple of weeks ago and then it rained for a couple of days and then it go too hot to want to be standing outside for hours. This weekend should be cooler and no rain in sight for at least a week.

Over the past year or two we have been dealing with steadily declining water pressure. It's been getting so bad that it's hit or miss whether we have an adequate pressure to even take a decent shower or use our dishwasher and washing machine. Forget about try to take a nice bath - by the time the tub can get filled up the water in it is luke warm because it took so long. The other morning, our neighbor who leaves for work at 6am, was trying to take a shower at 5:30 am and there wasn't even enough pressure to make a spray in his shower head.  That finally was the last straw for this very patient man. So, both of us called and complained to our exasperating 82 year old water well owner. We talked to her about this last summer.......where she tried to blame no rain for low water pressure...then she finally called her well repair company who told her at minimum she needed to replace the pump. It's reached the end of it's useful life and is also the reason her electric bills to run the pump  have tripled the past couple of years. She told me she needed a few months to come up with the money. So I called her again last December to find out when and was told she needed 6 more months to come up with the money. Called her this week, now another 9 months gone by, and "ohh....I just don't have the money. You'll have to just put up with it for another 6 months". Well, I'm done dealing with her. We at least need adequate water pressure to live a normal life. I reported her to the county yesterday, so we'll see what happens. Our good neighbor has offered twice now to take over the well from her, he will get it all repaired and maintained, manage the community well finances like it should be. But, no she thinks the well is worth $20,000 to sell.  Well, it's falling apart and most of it's components have reached or are reaching the end of their useful life (well has been in about 35 years now). According to the well company it would take about $30,000 to bring it all up to date and current code.

This is how stupid this well owner is:  she thought that the monthly electricity bill she gets from the power company, to run the electric well pump, was reporting GALLONS of usage each month on the bills! She says to me - "well my electric bill has tripled, so people must be using a lot more water than before. Back in 2013 it says 623 gallons, and now it says almost 1800 gallons".  I'm like "are you looking at your electricity bills? That is not GALLONS of water being used! That is the wattage of electricity being used to run the pump"  OMG she is such an idiot. There isn't even a meter on the well that would tell her how many gallons are being pumped. I told her that once she replaces the pump, that it working overtime because it is dying, her electric bills will go back down to normal and she'll start recouping some of that excess money she's spending every month.  Well, that and if she actually collected water fees from all 9 users, rather than just 3 of us, she would have reserves built up in order to pay for the repairs and maintenance. But that concept has always just eluded her.  Hopefully the county will take some action in some way.

I had this whole paragraph written how all my internet and vpn issses were resolved, but so far this morning I have been booted off vpn every few minutes, so that is still an issue. But, at least all our home issues are fixed - printer works and we can access the security camera system now. For now, IT guy has given me a temporary "work around" way to remote into my work desktop.  It will get resolved soon, I'm sure.

I am ready for this afternoon, be done working for the day and get on with the weekend!