Day 24 of 365

I'm a bit obsessed about our power bill. We run all electricity, no gas (our city doesn't even offer gas), so everything - lights, TV, water heater, stove, dryer - all wind up on our power bill. I'm so obsessive about keeping control over our power output that I've been tracking our average daily kilowatt since 2005.

Our Idaho Power bill's monthly statement includes a chart of average kilowatt per day for every month for the prior year. It compares the current month to the same month the year before. I've been taking it a step further, though. Back in 2005  I started tracking the number each month and inputting it into a spreadsheet. Then when 2006 rolled around, I plugged that number into the spreadsheet and had the formula tally the difference between the two months average daily use. Sometimes it was higher, sometimes it was lower. Every year after that I've continued to plug numbers in. I can see at a glance which months we use more or less, and have formulas in to give us 6 year totals of ups and downs.

The reason I track it so closely is purely financial. We have "level pay", so our bill is the same amount every month no matter what power was really used during the month. But the power company does audits of the level pay and readjusts it if you used too much or paid too much. So I like to see that readjustment number go down. There's nothing worse than a higher readjustment - especially with my income gone.

When a month is higher than the year before, I make sure we watch our use. When I see a month we've been higher a couple years running (like September), we watch our use even more. Since we've been working on lowering each month's daily average for the last six years, now it's becoming quite a challenge to see a month show up lower.

Again, I'm not really a "green" person so I'm not doing the kilowatt tracking for environmental reasons. But I started thinking about what life would be like living "off the grid", without electricity. At one point in my life, I was considering moving in that direction. I remember as a teenager visiting a home in Northern California with some folks who built their own house out of logs that they cut from their land. They grew their own food (even made their own cheese) and raised chickens and goats. They had no indoor plumbing and no electricity.

I wonder what it would be like to create your own power. I've heard of people putting in solar panels, but how could wind power play into creating electricity? When we did our cross country traveling we saw many old farmhouses with windmills. When we were driving back from our little Spring Break getaway today we also saw a couple of wind farms off the freeway. Just how feasible would it be to produce your own wind power nowadays?

It's surprising how just one picture can get my mind wandering.

Day 23 of 365

How much money is your health worth?

If you count the money spent on health-related costs for me over the last year, it'd be over $100,000. If you consider the toll it took on my family, the costs would be astronomical. If you count the cost that one day's activities - driving a few hours to a casino and gambling a bit - it might be close to $1,500.

The time spent winning the $1,500 I was so excited about yesterday was a bit detrimental to my system. Just sitting on stools and chairs with not-so-comfortable backs, standing, walking, and pushing buttons has done a number on my joints. Achy, swollen, hot joints.

And I'm doing my medication routine. I'm taking my chemotherapy drug and my injectable drug, but my lifestyle is not one I wish to keep. Granted, I just started the injectable and I need to give it time to work. But at a time when I should be so excited about getting something like a nice chunk of change, I'm having to focus on my health while at the same time trying to ignore the pain. I've been prescribed pain medication, but after many, many months of being in a drug induced stupor, I use them sparingly.

I'm frustrated (again) and I wish my life (and body) was different. So again I have to focus on the picture of the day to get me moving forward. The need to find something positive and good in the world allows me some brief respite from my own health problems.

Gambling problems? Not so much.

Day 22 of 365

Today appeared to be the perfect storm. Either the stars were in direct alignment, or the supermoon from this weekend carried over to the week, or maybe it was just plain luck.

My hubby is on Spring Break this week and our daughter had a couple days off, so we'd been looking to get away for a couple days. Since he's working on his book, he wanted to take his materials with him and seclude himself in a hotel room for a couple days. We were wanting to head to the mountains, but the snow just keeps coming and I'm not the most confident snowy road driver, so that plan was nixed.

Our second choice was the nearest gambling town, Jackpot, Nevada. We had received an offer earlier this month for comped rooms, some comped food, and some free gambling money from one of the hotels there. We're not big gamblers. In fact, I was in my mid-30s before I ever stepped into a casino. So a secluded room, time for writing, and a little time for some penny slots seemed like a grand idea. We even took a couple hundred dollars, just in case. We figured that amount would be adequate in case we wanted to gamble more or stop somewhere else along the way.

Adequate. Actually, it wound up being more than enough. Much more. Even with time set aside for writing my husband and I both hit several jackpots on penny slot machines. We kept cashing out and tucking the money away. When we got to the room and counted the money - all $1,500 of it. On penny slots. In one day. Staying in a free room, ate free food, and used their free cash. $1,500!

The clouds rolling in during our drive must have been a sign of the perfect storm we were about to enjoy. A gambling perfect storm of sorts.

Day 21 of 365

My husband is writing a book. Well, more like composing ideas and stories for a book. He's a high school teacher and has years worth of stories of what really goes on in a high school. By the time he retires in a few years, I'm sure he'll have many more. He's had the book idea in mind for a long time, but only recently has starting putting ideas down on paper.

He could easily write an autobiography of his life. Although he was born with Cerebral Palsy, he isn't confined to a wheelchair. He does walk with a limp and doesn't have use of the right side of his body. If you were to see him, you would think he'd had a stroke. (He gets that assumption from people a lot.) Despite his disability, he was very active in athletics as a kid. Played baseball, basketball, and football, and when he physically couldn't maintain the level of performance needed to play on a high school team, he still remained in athletics. He became basketball manager and was voted "Most Inspirational". He was also "Handicapped Student of the Year" for the State of Idaho.

He went on to college and continued being involved in athletics. He was involved with the athletic training department for Boise State University's football program and was the Equipment Manager for the basketball team. Graduated from college and got a teaching job.

That was almost 25 years ago. Since then he's been teaching at the same high school, has been named Teacher of the Year, has had a fellowship with our state senator back in Washington DC, served with the National Council of Social Studies, and has been on our city's Planning and Zoning Committee and our City Council.

While there are many people who have fought adversity, his life story is unique in that it is his. And maybe someday he'll write it. But right now he's working on his career life story. But he's not a writer. To use education-eze, his oral language proficiency exceeds his written language proficiency.

So it looks like I'll be the editor-in-chief as he pursues his latest adventure. To ease the burden of having a one-handed person typing hundreds of pages of text, (and me having to re-edit all of it) I bought him some micro cassettes. He now has hours of tape to tell his story.

Make a Tote Bag from an Upcycled T-Shirt - Day 20 of 365, Tutorial Tuesday

I had to stop and get some groceries today. Not too much, just some staples - fruit and veggies, yogurt, bread, eggs and some milk. I usually shop at the same few stores every time I make a trip to town. Fred Meyer, Target, and Walgreens.

But all along the way I seem to pick up too many plastic bags. A bag for the bread. A separate bag for the eggs. Yogurt gets its own. The prescription gets its own. Film to be developed? Another bag. We have a system for re-using the bags, but it seems lately they don't last like they used to. My husband uses them to take his lunch to work (then of course throws it away) and we double bag the kitty litter with them. Sometimes we use them for the garbage we create when cooking dinner or something, but otherwise they just sit there being stored. And for some reason we never seem to remember to take them back to the store to be recycled.

I see folks using cloth bags more and more these days, but then I read about how they harbor germs and that people don't wash them enough. I'm not a "green" person at all, but I've been wondering how to reduce our output of trash - including those plastic, not-so-strong bags.

Being the sewer that I'm becoming, I started looking up how to make the bags. Since we've traveled a lot, we have a lot of t-shirts. And being the big gal that I am, I don't always fit into the shirts we've bought. To solve the plastic bag problem and the "I can't fit into this shirt but don't want to get rid of it" problem, I turned several t-shirts into grocery sacks.

Hem the bottom, cut out the collar, cut away the sleeves, and you've got yourself a grocery sack.

I don't know how long they'll last, by I'm anxious to find out.

Need a tutorial to show you how to make your own t-shirt grocery bag? Got it!