TVs Are For Summer, Computers Are For Winter

Farmer H and I are in the middle of a disagreement. Well, a more specific disagreement than the lifelong disagreement that started the day I met him at the swimming pool of the apartment complex where I had a townhouse and he had a one-bedroom utilities-paid unit.

In discussing our rather large electric bill this month, I ventured that it might not be necessary for Farmer H to leave the garage light on all day, what with it being daylight when he leaves for work at 6:00 a.m., and the boys and I being off for summer vacation, and sometimes not even leaving the Mansion grounds at all. That garage light is not needed by the cats who loll about in the rafters, on pieces of plywood, next to light-up plastic yard-ornament Santa. Farmer H vacillates between declaring that he does NOT leave the garage light on, or, if he did, just one time, perhaps, it was because he was only being nice to us so that we did not have to enter the Indiana Jones-like cavern of mischief in pitch dark. Never mind that we never get ready to go anywhere before noon, and the fact that our garage has an entry door that is half window panel.

I also dared to ask Farmer H if it was time to change the filter in our heating and cooling furnace air conditioner thingamajigger, because the thermostat continually shines that message CHANGE FILTER from January through December. It might just be me, but rather than think it is simply a malfunction of the filter-sensor thermostat dealybob, like Farmer H pretends, I believe that happens because the filter needs changing. I base this belief on the discovery by the #1 son, when assisting Farmer H in changing said filter a couple of years ago, that written on the side of the unit was the date Feb 2005. Farmer H had taken to writing the date of the filter-changing down, just so he could prove to me that he changed it regularly. Which kind of came back to bite him in the butt, so severely so that I'm surprised he didn't end up in the emergency butt-bitten ward, remotely directing his fellow goat farmers to stage a telethon to raise money for a butt transplant.

Instead, Farmer H feels that the cause of the $100 jump in electricity is due to televisions. Televisions, running day and night, in three different rooms, sucking electricity from the bosom of AmerenUE like there's no tomorrow, depleting our domestic fuel reserves to power our TVs so we can rot our minds and lash out at him when he returns home from a hard day in the butcher-sawblade-making mines, after OH SO THOUGHTFULLY leaving a light on for us in the garage.

It seems like only yesterday, we were in the throes of a giant ice storm, an ice storm which knocked out Mansion power for five days, resulting in Farmer H purchasing a generator to run his castle. Oh, and he instructed us that before running it, the #1 son must turn off all power at the main breaker, and that we were only allowed to run certain appliances in combination. But the one thing that stood out was that while the furnace was on, the refrigerator and stove and washer/dryer and water heater must not be used, but that we could have one lamp and two TVs and a computer. Or something like that.

In any case, I know that a central air-conditioning unit draws way more power than three televisions. Why Farmer H could not just admit that maybe he should change that filter to make it run more efficiently is one of the mysteries of my universe.

This winter, we will have the same disagreement over why the heater for the Free Hairwad Hot Tub must run continuously, even though he has not hot-tubbed in at least a year. And he will tell us that we use our computers too much. Because TVs are for summer, computers are for winter.