A Couple New House Firsts

We got our first electricity bill this week. And it is cause for concern. We had to switch from City of Austin to Pedernales (pronounced here as Perdenales) Electric Cooperative for electricity with this move. Although the City of Austin services us for everything else still, water, wastewater, solid waste and recycling. So we closed on January 23rd and had the electricity turned on that same day. Our first bill was from January 23rd to February 4th, thirteen days. And it was $49.32! For thirteen days?! That's what we paid for one month of electricity with the City of Austin. Scary! Even though I almost never turn on lights during the day, we turn off lights when we leave rooms and we don't keep unnecessary lights on, we have been even more diligent with lights and anything else that uses electricity. And Roger has ordered dimmers for a bunch of lights and fixtures so we have the option of dimming a light, which uses less electricity, instead of just off or on. I'm scared to see a whole month's bill.

We also experienced our first storm in the new house. Tuesday night that crazy storm that was going across the Midwest causing all those tornadoes in Oklahoma came across Texas as well. It was a pretty bad storm up there, but down here it was not as bad. I'm sure some places got hit worse than we did. But what was weird was how we experienced it. In our old house, we would have heard and felt everything. We would have been able to hear and feel the wind and the rain. If we didn't have the blinds in the windows open we would not have known there was a storm. We couldn't hear anything, wind or rain, until the hail started hitting the front of the house since the wild wind was blowing everything side ways. We could see the rain being blown sideways down the street, but we couldn't hear or feel anything. I know, that's good. Let's us know our house is pretty solid. It was just weird, that's all. We watched the local cable provider weather channel as it skirted across Interstate 35. And of course, it only lasted here about five to ten minutes. If you have ever heard that saying, "Don't like the weather in Texas just wait five minutes", it's true.