Inflation Blues

 Power company is raising rates by 15% first of January.   

15%!!!!!!!!!!

Seriousfuckingly?????

Sorry about the swearing but I just saw it on facebook then found a news article on it.

Panic sets in, mind racing over budgeting.

That's after more water/sewer rate hikes and garbage rate hikes.

There are a few nonprofits that help with one time payments once a year on utility bills but you need to sell your soul to get the help, go, hat in hand, tell them all your finances, be judged, looked down on, all that to get that one time help a year.   To be honest, I'd rather rip off my fingernails.  It's less painful.

My highest energy use is for the dryer, heat and for water heating for a shower.  Winter months I run a space heater in the garage cat room, for the cats who refuse to come into the house.   It's made things easier on them and on the cats who are always in the house because then the cat yard/cat room ones don't come inside.  I won't need that too much longer as my kitties, The Family, are dying off from old age.  But for now I need it more than ever with the cat yard crew, who don't often enter the house, being old now too and less able to withstand cold and constant rain.

I lost 9 cats last year alone.  Only one, Starry, died of non age related illness.  She got intestinal tract lymphoma.  Starry wasn't young, but not super old either like the others who died. My dear Starry, from that swamp in North Albany, unwanted by the up and coming neighborhood, starving.   The others who died:  Bluebell, Storm (both from that 60 cat colony), Gidget (from when I got pimped out by the mayor to remove unwanted cats from an apartment complex), Mooki (the last remaining Spicer boy), Soloman, Panda (from that drug complex in Lebanon where residents shot at the cats), Comet (from Heatherdale trailer park) and Misty (from the Albany business).

I do a lot of laundry.  Anyone with cats does a lot of laundry.  I do wash only in cold water, at least.   The constant laundry runs up the water bill and the electric bill when I dry laundry in the dryer.   The weather here doesn't make for efficient drying on a line outside.  We get maybe two months of weather where that is possible.  

The side effects of a power cost increase trickle down farther than just my own residential bill.  All the businesses will get the increase and then pass on that cost in increased prices.  Like prices aren't high enough now.

So they claim in the article rates are going up, in part, due to power shortages.  And yet this state is trying to switch over to all electric vehicles.  Really?  With electric power so expensive and in short supply?  The state will have to kill off the poor people to achieve their climate goals I guess.  I'm just being bitchy because I'm in a panic over surviving this latest announced increase.

It'll work out somehow.   I'm thinking maybe having a no power day once a month just to see how that might go.  With prices increasing all the time, I feel a gut punch queasiness because I know prices are unlikely to go down in the future, just keep getting worse and worse and I fear I'll run out of ways to cut back.

I do now have these beautiful boots that should last for many many years......as promised....the photo.