Ride in the Park
Well, being the strange person I am I went for a bike ride along the Greenway Trail yesterday. The Greenway Trail is a 2.5 mile long asphalt path, and the only place in town to walk, bicycle, skate, etc. away from traffic. It was pretty nice when I moved to Boone, but unfortunately they have been improving it.
My old bicycle on the greenway
In the photo you can see the new wrought iron fence they put around the old damn building to keep people from being hurt in it. Of course the ruin has been there long enough for trees to grow up in it, but you have to do these safety things. I assume that is our gasoline taxes at work.
The also have finished ruining the most pleasent place to walk in town. The 1/4 mile access drive winding throught the woods was quite, shady, and not too much used. So last year they trimmed out the underbrush that blocked the noise from the softball diamond across the creek, and this year they paved it and made it the main walk way.
Towns with money are worse than big cities for messing things up. However, since the Greenway Trail is part Town of Boone, part Appalachian State University, and part Watauga County, I guess there is a committee dedicated to spending that windfall gasoline tax money before it gets taken back by the State of North Carolina.
Snow Again
Overnight we got nearly 3 inches of snow. That is the fourth snow since about the middle of October. I had to go uptown this morning and while I was there we had a mini-blizzard and almost another inch in about 20 minutes. They say it is the coldest it has been in this area (Boone, North Carolina) in 50 years.
Usually here in the mountains, Boone is at 3300 feet, we get weather about like maybe Cincinnati. The long time locals always say like Chicago, but having been there in the winter I can tell you that they are exaggerating. That means snow about Christmas/New Years and a couple of months of below freezing weather, at night. But heavy snow in the middle of November? Temperatures in the teens? Not in the few years I have lived here.
Oh they once had an eighteen inch blizzard and even the folks who were not born yet still talk about it. I think that was in 1950. So it looks like it may be a record cold and wet winter here this year.
Where Is the Power Going
I recently put my power usage for the past three years into an Excel spreadsheet and made a graph of it.That showed that for the past summer I had been using almost 50% more electricity than in the previous years. Where was it going?
Since I am on a budget plan where they base my monthly payment on my previous year’s usage that means that my monthly electric bill is going to go up quite a bit. Therefore the question, “Where was it going?” is important. Not being able to find one locally, nothing strange about that, I ordered a Kill-A-Watt from amazon.com. It arrived the other day, and while I have not had a chance to check a lot of things, some of them like the refrigerator need to be checked over a period of time as they turn themselves on and off, I do have some information already.
The new things I have gotten in the past year that may be eating power are the cheap coffee maker I got to replace the old one that sprang a leak, this computer workstation, and the UPS. Looking at them backwards from that order:
The UPS with only the wireless router and cable modem connected to it is pulling about 30 watts. They have been running 24/7, and I guess I am going to have to start shutting them down at night. That will save me about 7kwh/mo.
The workstation is pulling about 300 watts, add the 19 inch CRT monitor and we have about 370 watts. That is quite a bit, and it runs several hours a day. The whole set up comes to about 120kwh/mo, however it replaces the old system which surely pulled at least 1/2 that, and often was left on 24/7, so the increase is only in the order of 60kwh/mo.
The coffee maker pulls a whopping 935 watts. Only it is shutting down properly according to the Kill-A-Watt and only pulling that for about 10 minutes. Of course the hotplate cuts in and out if I leave it on, but that should not come close to the increase.
I have also gotten a 24 hour check on the refrigerator and it is pulling less than 1.0kwh/day or 30/month. I was kind of hoping the fridge would turn out to be the problem because that I could have the landlords fix. But obviously it is not.
There are many more things to check, what I mentioned above were the most obvious and thus I checked them first, and it will probably take me a month to go through everything. Also the Kill-A-Watt will not check any of the 220 volt appliances, nor anything that is hardwired in. For that I would need a clamp on ammeter which is kind of expensive. However I am looking at about $20 a month down the drain if I do not find the problem.
It is possible that the increase comes from a lot of little drains, which will make it harder to find, but the increase really is almost 50% of my base usage rate, and thus proportionally quite large.
Where is that copy?
The editor is yelling at me. I am late with my copy again.
I have been down with that bug, that I think is not a bug, but my medication reacting badly, again. I keep having the same recurring symptoms and my doctor has no idea what the cause is, but I found some folks on the internet reporting the same symptoms to a med that I am on. Only I am on a lot lower dose than they are. Very strangely, when I was younger I had a very high drug tolerance, it took a large dose to have the intended affect, and often normal doses had an opposite affect. For instance if I took two asprin for a head ache it made the head ache worse, but if I took 6 or 8 they worked as expected. Now I seem to be overly sensitive to a lot of medications, the standard dose being almost an overdose for me. I avoid medication whenever I can, especially new medications because they often react strangely with the medication I am already on. They really do not seem to know much at all about neurological problems. I must admit I like doctors who say, “I don’t know” a lot better than the ones who ignor what I tell them and plow ahead in full ignorance.
Let’s see, news, news…. Oh yes, we now have a Little Caesars Pizza in town. Nice to be able to get a hot pizza for a reasonable price. I picked up a ready to go pepperoni yesterday for five bucks. It was a nice treat for a change.
The Democrats had a smashing victory in the recent election. I wonder why?
Press Cameras Coming Back?
It seems like press cameras are alive and well out there.
I ran into a guy, Jesse Hawk, using a Speed Graphic here in town the other day. Stopped and chatted a bit. He turned out to be a University Student. He said he liked using the old camera but the switch that chose which shutter to use with the body release was stuck. Like a lot of folks he was using it as a cheap view camera. I gave him a link to my websites; maybe he will become interested in using it as it was intended to be used. His website is here, Jesse Hawk Photography.
And, a short awhile back Bruce Wells, over in England who does a lot of retro stuff with his Speed Graphic contacted me with nice things to say about my Press Camera site. He calls himself a “Classic Theme Photographer. He has kind of a 40’s & 50’s romantic style. I think you will find his work interesting. Here is a link to his website, Bruce Wells.
It is nice to see the old war horses coming in from pasture now and then. The press camera was the “Professional Camera” from about 1920 to 1960. As Weegee said, “Real photographers use the Speed Graphic”.