Electric Summer

Dearest Rachel –

Yesterday morning, I was carrying my cereal bowl into the dining/family room to eat breakfast – I’ve never really managed to find a good, comfortable place to set myself down in the kitchen on one of those bar stool chairs I’d gotten shortly after the remodeling was completed, and the fact that I rarely manage to wake Daniel, even if I’m trying to, gives me little incentive to actually keep my distance from him – when I heard the unmistakable hum of a running motor at the other end of the family room. I immediately assumed that the wall-mounted space heater had flipped on, in response to the air conditioning having brought the ambient temperature down to what it was programmed to think was an unacceptably cold temperature, and went to adjust the thermostat by the pantry before remembering that it no longer controls anything. It was only after a few moments of fiddling that I realized that not only was what I was doing pointless, but it wasn’t the space heater making that noise in the first place, but rather, the old industrial-style steel floor fan that I think you must have gotten for a garage sale many years ago and Daniel, even back then, claimed as his own.

Of course, while it wasn’t really having any effect on anyone, since it was pointed at his rocker/recliner (and he was sound asleep on the couch, as he always is at that time in the morning), I didn’t bother to turn it off. It wasn’t doing any harm, after all, and it would be necessary soon enough, once he work up and ensconced himself in his usual throne.

It’s one of the signs of summer here at the house; not only do we run the air conditioner, but – since the added rooms weren’t, and can’t be, connected to the house’s HVAC system – the fans are also switched on in the various extensions throughout the house. Now unlike Daniel, I held off on doing so for a few days, but I finally succumbed to the discomforting effects of the heat last night. So now the ceiling fan is now running, and not likely to be stilled until late September at the earliest.

None of this should really come as any surprise to you by now; while it’s true that we forget what the extremes of our weather patterns are like when we’re at the opposite point of the year, we all, deep down, know both how cold and how hot it gets in winter and summer, if we give ourselves time to think about it. And in fairness, the fact that the earth takes its sweet time around the sun gives us that time to get used to those changes; rather than a sudden change of temperature, like flipping a switch from ‘Alaskan tundra’ setting to ‘Mojave desert’ in an instant, we’re given months to shift ourselves from peak cold to peak heat, and slowly get used to one from the other. I mean, sure, there are days where you start with a heavy coat in the morning, and by noon, you’re wishing you could go topless, but those are exceptions rather than the rule. By and large, it’s a steady progression from one extreme of the thermal limit (and the countermeasures we take to balance against it) to the other.

This also means that, as our gas bill drops to negligible amounts (thank heavens I have that set up to be paid straight from the bank account; it’s hardly worth wasting the stamp), the electricity usage ramps up. It’s nothing we can’t handle, of course, but it is a bit more noticeable these days, thanks to inflation.

There’s also this nagging sense that someone out there isn’t pleased with our usage of electricity, though. Despite also paying this bill electronically, like the one for the gas, I will get letters from the electric company nearly every month as well, which always confuses me (because I thought the whole point of online payments were to reduce mail and paper waste and all that). As it happens, the monthly letter is to inform me that, compared to our neighbors, we’re not the most efficient users of electricity on the block. In fact, we consistently use more electricity than the average.

In all honesty, this doesn’t come as a surprise. Unlike those who scatter off to school and work, there’s almost always someone at home, so it’s not as if we turn off the utilities to regulate the house’s ambient temperature. We also have an inordinate amount of electronic equipment – televisions, computers, smart phones – at least one for every one of us living here, and then some. All of which has always been the case: in particular, you might remember how we would jerk around those spam callers who would insist that something is wrong with our computer, and would ask us to allow them to have remote access to it in order to “fix” it, and how we would stymie them by asking them “which computer?” had the problem, leaving them sputtering and occasionally swearing at us.

So to hear that we’re using more electricity than most of our neighbors doesn’t come as any surprise; indeed, it’s been par for the course nearly as long as we’ve lived here. But after a while, I find myself wondering as to what the point is of these letters. Is it to warn me that my bill is going to be higher than my neighbors? One, I don’t know what any of them pay, and two, if I use more, I should expect to pay more. That’s not a problem for me; as long as I think I’m getting value for money (and when I come inside after being out in the summer heat, that’s an easy conclusion to arrive at), I’m going to happily continue to pay for it.

My concern is that this is meant to convey some sort of disapproval on the part of the electric company, which you would think would be the last thing they would want to do. “You’re buying too much of our product! Shame on you!” Wouldn’t they want to encourage us to purchase more from them, in order to increase their profits? That’s generally how capitalism works. I realize they’re only able to produce a finite supply of power at any given time – indeed, when you come down to it, everything on the closed system that is earth is ultimately finite – but most of the stuff of life exists in sufficient quantities so as to be practically infinite, in human terms. And yet, there are enough people who think we’re running out of it all, just as they thought so fifty-plus years ago, when we were kids.

Only now, some of us that had that message drilled into us as kids are running the show, and still believe that we’re running out, notwithstanding the fact that, if what we were told back then had been true, we should have run out of everything before the turn of the millennium, among so many other things. But rather than questioning that dogma – and celebrating the fact that the modern doomsday prophets are modern-day ecological William Millers, complete with an inverted form of the Great Disappointment – they just double down, and pretend they never mentioned dates before, all while moving back the date we were supposed to run out of everything further into the future, and demanding we cut back. Ordinarily, I’d just laugh and ignore them, but if any of them are running the power company – and sending me these notices every month, wasting paper and postage on lecturing me in the process – I might begin to wonder if they’ll cut me off for being so ‘wasteful,’ in their opinion.

Imagine what summer would be like if that happened. I might even be forced to agree with them about global warming, if I couldn’t use the air conditioner!

Anyway, it hasn’t come to that yet, but nevertheless, keep an eye on me, honey, and wish me luck. I’m going to need it.