My body must know it's summer vacation. Usually each morning, I'm awake about 6:30... 7:00 on a late day. The kids have to be leaving the house by 7:45 to catch their bus, so sleeping in just isn't an option. But, this week, even though I have very LONG "to do" lists, I just can't drag my body out of bed... Today has been the earliest I've gotten up and going, but it's still at least an hour later than normal. I want to enjoy sleeping in, but I don't like feeling so groggy and tired all the time... the lethargicness (is that a word?) has been lasting until 11 or noon when I finally break out the Diet Coke!
I have been working on my paper work clutter ... I recycled a TON, threw away quite a bit, filled my whole shredder, and filed a stack of paperwork that was several inches high. There is still much to do, but I have tackled the "phone counter" and the "computer desk"- these are the two worst clutter spots in the whole house. My room gets bad too, so I'm hoping to tackle that today.
I also just decided to switch over to SRP's "Time of Use" plan. This is a plan for "heavy" electricity users (like us...) to try to save money. Essentially, you pay double the normal rate from 1-8 p.m. (M-F) and half the normal rate during all other times (including all weekend). I've heard that if you are a "stay at home mom" or if you have a home office, this plan won't save money, it will cost you more, but we are going to give it a shot. Last year, my most expensive electric bill was $475... I'm just sick of paying that kind of money! So, the deal is, that you have to time all your major electricity usuage to be before 1 p.m. or after 8 p.m. Major juice suckers include the Washer/Dryer, Dishwasher, A/C and Big Screen TV's. I'm just a little happy to have a really good excuse to severely cut back on the TV time in the afternoon! I'm also going to try a new strategy with the A/C... run it colder than I normally do in the morning and then for the afternoon, set the thermostat at 85... we'll see how many hours it takes to warm up and have to click on... hopefully when it gets too hot to stand, we can go outside and swim... that always makes a huge difference when you can cool the body temp down. Then after 8 p.m. we can turn it back down and cool it down for bedtime. With this new plan, we get a three month "trial"... if at the end of three months, we've spent more than we would with the traditional plan, they will credit back the over charge to my account, so at least for 3 months, we don't have anything to lose!
