• goodbadi

    Electrical Resolution…?

    August 6, 2010

    The Southerner who had voted for the winning candidate in a primary election and who was interviewed today on an NPR newscast said of the Gospel-singer victor, “I know Gospel singers, and there are some real stinkers among them, but [the winner] is not one of them.”

    And then there are other ladies about whom such warm laughter comes not so easily.

    Take the landlady of the land adjacent to the western side of our property. She is stealing our electricity by refusing to pay for what her farmer tenant uses.

    Background: It’s not just a simple situation. See, the water for our house and for our neighbor’s barn (our house and the barn used to belong together) is pumped from a spring on the adjacent land. The pump is powered by electricity from the neighbor’s barn, and the barn’s electricity–for the pump, which the barn and we share, as well as for whatever else the farmer wants to use it for–comes from our house, through our meter. This means that we pay for whatever electricity the farmer uses. Unfortunately, short of us installing our own pump and water line, which we have rights to do per our deed (even though the western landowner has told us, “You will not put in a new line to the spring”), there is no way for us to separate completely the barn’s and our energy consumption.

    More background: Probably for years past, and certainly since we moved in fifteen months ago, the western landowner has not paid any money towards the electricity consumed by the barn in this arrangement. According to her, everything the farmer does with the electricity “doesn’t draw any current.” She never offered–and refused when asked–to compensate us even a little bit for any of it.

    Even more background: In the last months, the western landowner agreed to obtain her own power supply for the barn, with us continuing to power the pump for our house and the barn until we install a water line (that connects to the current line, mind you, not to the spring itself) and pump just for us. Neither of us has followed through.

    Now, as I’ve mentioned before, she is an interesting person to deal with. She used to own much of the land around here (including our house) and in her mind she still does. She’s sort of a localized Scarlett O’Hara.

    So here is my western landowner diary entry (yes, I keep a log of our interactions) for today:

    This morning a representative from our electricity cooperative telephoned regarding an unrelated issue, then said that she asked him to mention to us that since creating her own electrical hookup and account would require her to hire an electrician for some barn rewiring and would cost her a minimum $20 monthly account fee, she would be just as happy to pay the $20 per month to us and leave the electrical arrangement as it is.

    I thanked the gentleman, then called she. She was agreeable in every sense of the word, and suggested she pay in four-month installments.

    All good, right?

    Wrong.

    Two minutes later she called back to ask if she could start paying the first of the month.

    “You mean September?” I said.

    “Yes, since he’s not using any current now anyway,” she said.

    “He is using his electric fence,” I said.

    “That doesn’t draw any current,” she said.

    I reluctantly agreed to a September 1 start date, but soon found myself fuming. The $20 (minus her previous tenant’s plowing and mowing for us) she should have paid us for each of the months we’ve lived here already wasn’t even really the issue. It was the irresponsibility of her not even offering  or acknowledging that it would be just for her to pay for the electricity she and her tenant have been using at our expense that has had me fed up ever since we’ve moved in.

    I decided not to be a pushover. I called her back.

    “Would you consider adding $10 to the September payment to pay for the second half of August, too?” I asked. “Since the farmer is using electricity?”

    “No, I wouldn’t. That electric fence isn’t drawing any current, and I want to keep the payments monthly. And besides, the $20 is more than we’re using anyway.”

    [Now, this very well may be the case. I plan to reconsider the ethics of accepting that amount after I feel she’s paid off the electricity she’s already not paid for, and after I’ve done some metering to see just how much current does in fact go to the barn.]

    “He has been using the fence all summer,” I said. (I didn’t mention the radio he keeps also on as a theft deterrent sound polluter, which probably costs us fifty or maybe just five cents a month.) “You decide.”

    “Yes, I’ll decide, and whatever I decide will be fine,” she said.

    I thanked her and hung up.

    Good grief!

    I’ll believe and be extremely grateful for the reimbursement money from her when it starts coming, and I’ll feel justified in accepting it.

    And sooner or later I’ll find a way to humor this obstinate woman in a way that is both respectful to her and satisfying to my sense of justice.

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  • goodbadi

    Live Trap

    July 21, 2010

    Last Thursday my bro-in-law D and I visited the bar where my drummer and his other band were playing their funky metal really, really loud. I wore ear plugs, and was mightily impressed with both their effectiveness as well as the instrumentalistism of the band.

    I didn’t get home until crazy late, like 10:30, and the Pepsi I’d ordered up from the bartender was waning but still keeping me on my toes. As I unlocked the doors and opened up the house to let in some fresh air, down on the road a car stopped. I could tell someone was walking around, and I heard a voice say, “I got it,” before the car drove on.

    I get really nervous about things like that. Was somebody prowling around? I wondered. I hadn’t heard the person get back in the car, so I ran upstairs for the big and heavy flashlight I bought with last year’s birthday money.

    I stood on the porch and shined my light around but didn’t see anyone or anything else down at the road. Then, what I felt was the same vehicle drove by again, the other way, and I watched from behind one of our pretentious pillars for suspicious activity, but of course it was dark, so nothing stood out.

    That didn’t mean I wasn’t still on edge, though. I ate a bedtime snack on the porch and kept my flashlight handy before I headed to bed, my jumpy spirits calming only slightly, largely due to the reassuring presence of the driveway gate I put up last summer.

    But the next morning I discovered that I’d forgotten to shut the gate after coming home (so much for that barrier to invasion). I also discovered what my flashlight hadn’t made obvious: the live trap in which four groundhogs, a possum, and a skunk had met their ends and which I hadn’t set for several weeks but had left in place down by the groundhog hole on this side of the stream bed which is on the house side of a sturdy pasture fence was very much gone.

    It must have been a premeditated act of theft, as the trap was only visible from the road in the daylight. Those buggers had seen it and come back for it.

    I was a bit nervous, going away for the weekend. Our corn was about ready to pick, and our house certainly isn’t burglar proof, and my tools are just out in the shed out back.

    Thankfully, though, nothing else (that I remember having had) was gone when we returned. And I came back with some tremendous suggestions for dealing with the hooligans, including this one: put another live trap as bait into a really, really big live trap.

    Hmmm.

    Anyway, the corn survived, and today we processed and froze 235 ears. Whew!

    I actually enjoyed the ordeal a bit, after getting over my frustration at the looming fact of being trapped in a cycle of harvesting and storing food–what a wonderful problem to have–but not getting to do other projects.

    That’s a good live trap.

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  • goodbadi

    One Way to Be Rich

    June 13, 2010

    Alas, the many summer projects bouncing around in my brain’s possibilities department require money. So, as I said to a coworker at our end-of-the-year picnic Friday, “I’m trying to learn contentment.”
    “Yes,” he said. “There are two ways to be rich. One way is to have a lot of money, and the other is to be happy with what you have.”

    “If I’m ever rich,” I replied, “it will most likely be the latter kind.”

    I’m sure my bemoaning our financial status would strike most people in the world as completely ridiculous: I’m already rich, with a wonderful house to live in, met needs, and many met wants, not to mention the things I have that money can’t buy, like family and good health. Just look at our gardens:

    Are we wealthy? No doubt. These pictures don’t even show the berries patches or orchard.

    However, that global perspective gets clouded by more immediate Things I Want to Do: move the electric pole from the middle of our front yard ($1,500); replace our car with a minivan ($15,000); relocate our wood stove ($2,000), move our kitchen ($10,000); and the list goes on and on and on. And on. I doubt $100,000 would even take care of it–just for starters.

    I’ve always been this way. My favorite adolescent reading was Gander Mountain catalogs, and my parents had to maintain tight control over my paper route earnings. Their general rule of thumb was, “Think about it for a week, and then we’ll talk about it.”

    That took care of many of my ideas then, but now my desires lack neither longevity nor practicality. Maybe a week would have been enough time for me to forget about that little plastic audio mixer with a built-in mic and two tape decks for disc jockeying parties (which I never had, anyway), but now that our band is becoming established, my want for a sound system feels more grounded.

    All that said, the limiting factor of our cash flow means that our spending glacier is not threatened by global warming, and so moderation and contentment are more than ever necessary for the learning.

    Fortunately, as my dad told me my uncle says, there are always free projects to work on. So I’d better get busy.

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    Ice Cream Social

    May 23, 2010

    For a while, we weren’t sure anyone would come to the neighborhood ice cream “meet and greet.” We’d invited a few of the closest neighbors along our road, bought 15 quarts of ice cream, picked strawberries, and cleaned the house.

    So we sat on our front porch and looked at our creek side garden that I had only begun to weed and hoe earlier in the day, and waited.

    At 7:15, with only fifteen minutes left in the invitation times window, we were getting excited about having all that ice cream and a quiet evening to ourselves when in our driveway drove neighbors J and S’s car.

    During our visit, another couple came and went, but J and S seemed very glad for neighborly interaction. They’ve lived here for two decades and even went to the next-door church for 10 years, with nary an invite to anything personal. It’s not that they–or the locals–aren’t nice people. “They’re all very friendly, and they’d give the shirt off their back for you,” they said. “But you can’t break in.”

    “And they’re all related,” they said. “So you have to be careful about who you talk about.”

    They told us lots about the people around us, including this about our western neighbor who used to own our house and theirs and to whose spring we have rights (which we are considering exercising, against her will):

    They bought their farm from a bank; the previous purchaser had gone bankrupt. The farm was where she had raised her family; she had sold it to the now-bankrupt purchaser.

    When our neighbors were scoping things out while their purchase of the place from the bank who had received it back from the bankrupt purchaser was underway, our western landowner showed up offering to sell them the curtains in the house ($150 a set) and a few other things around the place. They didn’t pay her, of course, but said she could have the curtains, which are still bagged in their attic (it’s been 21 years). 

    For a while, too, after they moved in, she would stop by twice a week to get drinking (well) water; she said she could only drink that water (“It’s the best water anywhere,” she told them). The man across the street, noticing that she was coming by frequently, inquired, and said, “What? She never drank that water when she lived there. I’ll take care of that.” Soon she stopped coming by, and they haven’t seen her since.

    (These were reassuring stories to hear, in that it was good to know that our frustrations with her denial of reality, persistent infallibility, and confident ownership of the community aren’t our fault.)

    So we ate ice cream and strawberries and drank the lemon-mint tea M had made and had a neighborly chat until 10:30.

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  • goodbadi

    Revelation

    January 28, 2010

    Tuesday night I decided that our water pressure was just too powerful. The shower even felt spiky at times. Our outdoor faucet dripped constantly. The evening dishwater was extra foamy.

    “Something’s wrong,” I told M. “I think the pump’s running all the time.” Sure enough, when I investigated, the pump was stuck on–and the pressure gauge showed numbers twice as high as normal.

    We resorted to using the electrical panel breaker as a water valve, turning the power to our neighbor’s barn–yes, we supply the neighbor’s barn with power, which then powers our water pump, which is also his cattle’s water pump–on for a few minutes to fill the pressure tank, then off until our faucets gurgled dry.

    Figuring this all out required tramping up and down our driveway in the dark, crisp night with my big 4-D cell LED Maglite and in my pajama pants and work boots, so it wasn’t until late that I fell into a fitful sleep just dreading the inevitable maintenance call bill, bemoaning our electrical interconnectedness with the farmer whose cattle I’d just looked out for by closing the rickety poor man’s gate at the end of the driveway, since not providing power to the barn meant the electric fences along our driveway were just useless strands of metal string, and wondering how this pump situation–and the larger problem of our inseparability from providing current to the barn, for free–could be resolved most efficiently and inoffensively.

    After all, no longer providing him free power might remove the farmer’s willingness to mow our pasture (he’s done it twice) or plow our driveway (once) or might make him park ungainly and trashed vehicles right by our property line or be a less nice person to us. Or maybe he’d make sure his cows got right up to the spring house, causing it to deteriorate even more rapidly than it already is.

    And the solution to installing a new water and power line to a pump of our own didn’t seem that simple–too many complicating factors–until….

    Before I woke up Wednesday morning, I had a dream, of course about my preoccupation matter at hand. In my dream I came up with the perfect solution for when we put in our own pump and water line: run a gravity-flow water line from the current pump house down hill to our property to a new pump house and pump of our own, which would then send the water up the hill to our house. Simple? You bet. But I hadn’t thought of it before.

    I rolled out of bed, made sure the pump still wasn’t shutting off, called the farmer to let him know the situation and that I’d closed his gate, and headed off to school armed with the phone number to call the fix-it-up-chappies, who came out later and remedied the situation.

    As I pulled through our barnyard driveway after school, there was the farmer.

    “This is soppy,” he said. “I ought to bring a load of gravel down here. And thanks for calling to let me know about the pump and gate. When you get the bill, just give it to me–it’ll help pay for the power I use.”

    Well.

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    Shameless Commerce: That Wood Basket

    January 24, 2010

    Back in November, after I reviewed so shamelessly the wood basket offered for my critique, someone said they wondered if what I’d written was even a review. Pretty much all I’d written about was getting the basket, putting it together, and how shiny it was. Here’s a follow up:

    So far, the wood basket has held up to my beating of large loads of logs. For a while, though, the little handle nuts kept loosening, so I Gorilla glued them in place and now they seem to be holding. The basket also squats–or sags–under its heavy loads. I never carry it loaded over my feet for fear it will collapse and deposit the firewood onto my toes.

    But it’s still in one piece, and if I’d clean it, it’d still be shiny.

    Before actually going out and purchasing any goodbadi-reviewed item, please email goodbadiblog@gmail.com to confirm that the reviewed item or service features include longevity.

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  • goodbadi

    Church Nuts

    December 16, 2009

    This morning’s Sunday school hour discussion at our church focused on reducing the (currently 85 percent time) pastor’s hours. We broke into small groups to gather feedback for the leadership team about making the position quarter time, for a salary of $17,000.

    One lady in my group said, “I work full time in the poultry plant and get paid $18,000 a year. My husband is a chicken catcher, and he gets paid that much, too.” (Only later did I think of a semi-suitable response: “Your jobs deserve higher pay.”)

    (Speaking of poultry, the Sunday before, I listened as a local man told a small audience during the coffee break that if you hit a turkey in the back of the head in the summer, it will instantly die, but in the winter you can hit it all you want and it won’t die.)

    From another group came a lone comment encouraging growth: “Maybe we could make fliers and pass them door-to-door inviting people to come to our church. Maybe it could say, ‘Now accepting different beliefs.'”

    Little did the speaker know that my attendance was evidence that variational doctrine had already entered the fold, albeit unannounced. An overview:
    ….The demand for eye-for-an-eye, sacrifice-based justice is a human tendency incorrectly attributed to God when it comes to Jesus’ death. I don’t think God Who Is Love requires–or ever required–bloodshed.
    ….Real “salvation” is what Zaccheus experienced. This pitifully selfish and thoughtless man became enabled not through the Jesus-centered, murderous attempt to quell rebellion but through gracious opportunities to make things right and refocus on that which is life giving and just. After all, according to C.S. Lewis (via Anne Lamott), grace is the only element of Christianity that separates it from all other religions. (By the way, its very presence refutes God’s bloodlust theology.)
    ….The Bible reveals a lot about how people of Judeo-Christian lineage have understood God throughout the years, understandings that I imagine might be flawed and continually developing.

    Doctrine aside, I recently provided my own input to the church, since M and I have decided to attend: “Some things I like to experience in church are study, singing, and support…. The small size of this church is to its advantage: the services and structures can be flexible, intimate, and meaningful–maybe it’s a house church with a building. Here’s something I envision: Sunday morning services of singing, discussion, sharing, meditations/sermons–whatever. I’m all for abandoning traditional expectations and just letting planners decide how the morning can go. I’m also all for weekly potlucks (maybe with some organizational oversight) for after the service. This will allow for further meaningful connection with each other. As things develop, small groups and mission-focused groups could continue or form as people want.”

    Selah and Amen.

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