Tuesday's Trade-in

I woke up early this morning and could not get back to sleep, so I finally got up. I felt better than I had in the last couple of days, but I did not want to push myself by doing something to hinder my feeling better.

I had initially though about going for a walk while it was still nice and cool, but then I thought that walking kind of irritates whatever it is that is wrong with my side. I knew that I made the right decision when I took the recycling out front, as just lifting the bin without the two bags of paper recycling in it was strenuous. So after taking the recycling up front I made myself an egg beater omelet, a veggie sausage and a couple left over biscuits.

After eating I went out to the garage and brought the step ladder into the house and upstairs. The reason behind this was that we were having an energy audit the first thing this afternoon and they needed to get into the attic.

Then I went into the living room to read the paper. The mail came as I was finishing up the paper, but when I went out to get it the only thing there was an advertising flier. The mailman could have just skipped our house if that is all he had for us.

After that I went out to the rose garden and did a little pruning, digging out tree suckers, cutting out blackberry shoots and pulling a few weeds. I knew that it was getting close to the time I needed to go into the house and get cleaned up for our energy audit, so I put things away and went into the house and cleaned up.

The gal that did the audit was here for about an hour and three quarters and I think we changed out about thirty incandescent light bulbs and put in several types of electric florescent bulbs. They gave us all the bulbs and so I took and installed as many as they gave us.

She said that we had reached our limit of free bulbs; I do not think most people have as many lights as we have in this house. Even replacing thirty lights we still have another twenty-five or thirty more to replace. We are hoping that the new bulbs will cause our power usage to go down and with that our power bill.

After she left, I made myself a salad for lunch and realized that we really need to go to the grocery store and get some more salad fixings. After I finished lunch I asked Kathleen if she wanted to go to the credit union with me and she said that she did. So finally about 1630 we took off.

We got there too late last night to make the deposit, so I wanted to make sure that we go there before they closed today. After finishing at the credit union Kathleen suggested stopping at BiMart, so on the way there she passed a "dollar" store, so she stopped and when we parked she saw that it was closed, so since we were stopped anyway we went into the Ace hardware store to look around a bit.

Escaping without spending any money we took off and then went to BiMart. They had flowers outside for a couple bucks each so we bought four, then we went inside and bought a couple more florescent lights, some blueberry fig bars for me, some nuts for Kathleen, some peanut brittle for Kathleen, and a few other things that have slipped my mind for now.

As we were checking out and I was paying for what we bought, Kathleen found a round table for out back for only ten dollars, and so after I paid for the table we took off. It was a good thing we brought her SUV instead of my Jeep, the table would not have fit into the Jeep very easily.

We finally made it home about 1830 and Kathleen boiled some potatoes to make a potato salad for dinner. Besides the potato salad we also had some left over salmon and some celery sticks. Well, the energy audit was very worth while today, it did not cost us anything and we probably got seventy-five dollars worth of free light bulbs.

They also told us how we could qualify for rebates for us getting new windows, insulation and a few other things. I would recommend all our Oregon children check into having an audit. They also have rebates for hot water heaters, furnaces and other things. We just replace our furnace and hot water heater a few years ago so they said we did not need to do that.

Well, I did not get a lot done today, but it was a very worth-while day. So here's to a good night to a good day!