Brrr! Fall is in the air!

Yes, fall is in the air here in Hawaii. First, it's starting raining a lot more. Today is another day with a lot of dark gray cloud cover instead of the white fluffy clouds and blue sky that I'm more used to. We're not using our ceiling fans much these days and I've got all the patio doors shut, too. I might even have to put on a sweater!

We got our first full monthly electric bill, so I called Mama to compare those costs as well. "Ours was five eighty five," I said. "Five dollars and eighty five cents?" asked my mother. Mama's so cute. "No, five hundred eighty five dollars."

"My goodness!" she said, using that strong language again. So she starts poking thru her records, looking for her old bills. The highest she could find was $95 for July.

"What do you have your thermostat set at?" she asked.

"We don't have air conditioning. We don't have a thermostat."

"Oh."

Our pool pump is the culprit for a big part of our costs. But still, my office mate said his electric bill was $270 last month, and his 3-bedroom place is half the square footage of our house. So even with our pool pump, we're not completely off the bell curve.

I jumped on the electric company's site and did an energy survey, and we're doing all the right things. So just one more part of the price of living in paradise.

Speaking of prices, I needed eggs this week. They had cheaper ones, but I decided to support local farmers, and bought the local dozen for $4.29. But as I put them in my cart, I thought "wait a minute." Why are the local chickens charging me $4.29 when I can buy mainland eggs for $2.94? But I bought the local ones anyway.

I'm trying to take my own cloth bags to the stores here. Discovered one store gives me .03 cents credit per bag I bring in, and the other gives me .05 for using my own bag. Whoo hoo! I can put that towards the electric bill...

Well, UT won a football game yesterday, 34-3, probably saving Phil Fulmer's job. Vandy lost to Georgia, but they're still in good shape. The Titans are winning so far today. My fantasy team is doing abysmally, but I've gotten used to that this year. It's still fun. Winning is more fun, though...

We're still making progress on the house, a little bit every week. I took a lot of stuff to Goodwill yesterday, pillows, old bedspreads, shoes, purses, CDs and DVDs. There's an attendant there who made comments on all my stuff. He wanted to know why I was getting rid of the DVD's and CD's. I told him I had the music on my iPod and didn't want the CDs any more. When I brought out all the bags of bedding, he said, "you're really cleaning out." Oh, for an un-attended Goodwill drop point...

Some of this stuff, I don't know how it made it out of Australia. But once it got to England and was in our flat there with its 25 steps up to the front door, it pretty much stayed there. However, here, it's easy to get rid of extra stuff, so I'm trying to do that, have more room for Hawaii souvenirs!

Next time - more on the curtains (might even manage some pix) and more on the symphony chorus!