IT's WINTER....SNOW IS GOOD!A good frozen snow kills the larvae of the destructive insects that 'winter over' in their little hiding places to emerge in spring and wreak havoc with your food crops, fruit trees, etc. Also those pesky mosquitoes that winter over in a mild season and on the first warm day there seem to be multitudes beyond what 'seems' normal.
Yes, our infrastructure sucks. Why they did not spend the money they had received from taxes, surcharges, etc., on underground wiring as they did in the Truckee region is purely nonsensical. To run electric/phone cables THROUGH the trees was an idea from people with no sense whatsoever. Did they think that heavy, wet snow laden branches hanging on the wiring would have no ill effects? By not spending the initial extra cost to run an underground system save them any money in the long run, when they now have crews working 24/7 and bringing in crews from out of the area to compensate for the lack of manpower locally?
On my property, for some bizarre reason, a tree trimming crew is assigned to maintain the growth around the one power pole outside my gate. These guys come every month. There is NO GROWTH around this pole, no branches looming overhead, but they still come out every month. Two poles up from this well manicured site, there are branches interwoven with the wiring. WHAT THE HELL???!!!!
Now maybe I've written here without doing research on WHY these funds seem to be mismanaged. But it takes no research to report that PG & E hassled me with phone calls, using their manpower to do so, to tell me how good their SMARTMETERS were and how it was mandatory that I have one installed. I did research on this brainchild invention to learn that these were really DUMBMETERS imposing much larger usage fees than what the consumer was really using. I did not allow them to install one, and now I learn that many who have had them installed, had their utility bills double and triple and their usage did not change, just the meter did. To dispute the outrageous bills and refuse to pay it meant the service was cut off. The consumer had no choice but to pay up and shut up.
The utility companies remind me of the government. Lots of money in, lots of reasons given to those that pay into the system why the money is not being spent logically and somehow, magically, there are those in high places running the show living with unmeasurable wealth.
Kinda brings out the revolutionary in me, but of course to take a stance and instigate change would find me at the bottom of a lake. As it is, publication of THE CHE DIARIES had a CIA dude trailing me who probably still is. This, I find rather humorous and sad simultaneously, because if the government can tail a grandmother of almost five who writes one little, harmless book and Osama and the pirates are still running wild, then I'd say, there's a misappropriation of the resources that WE PAY FOR.
But all off-the-track-of-winter snow verbiage aside, enjoy winter despite the inconvenience of no power - our family was out of power for 4 days and I melted snow to flush my toilet. It's not global warming (this is another invented farce) it's WINTER! Yes, they killed the Gulf, and this will effect climate as has many of the other crimes of greed has altered the natural balance, but don't buy into the distraction of GLOBAL WARMING, as that's a smokescreen, or in winter terms, a WHITE OUT, so we don't pay attention to the sinister shit that's going on that our tax dollars are paying for that we don't know about and never will.
Be it known, that I'm not opposed to taxes to pay for what is needed to run countries. There WAS enough money to have good, solid infrastructures, educated people, programs for the less fortunate and elderly and enough HEALTHY food so nobody goes hungry. Instead, we have what we are living with today, child molesters and murderers with health care, hard working Americans with NO health care, mass produced food with no nutrients, multitudes of uneducated, impoverished people and elders on so many prescription drugs that they are hallucinating, crumbling infrastructure and the military being mis-used in places we don't need to be.....and the list goes on.
Do love the aspects of winter that are the signature of the season and prepare for the inconvenience our crumbling infrastructure offers so you can still flush your toilets, use your candles and lanterns SAFELY so you don't burn your house down and maybe, we'll have less destructive pests this spring in our gardens and orchards.
