Ed Icionsub

Notice the car up on cinderblocks. The only thing missing is the pitbull chained in the yard.

Now that its getting cold and I have to run the heat, my electric bill is creeping up, higher and higher each month. I have to admit – it is much harder and more expensive to heat my home than it is to keep it cool in the summer months. I have a lot of windows, a fireplace, and lower level two car garage. All of these are energy wasters and a home energy audit can alert you to the same kind of areas in your home that are leaching the heat from your house.

It only takes one electric bill over $400 to get my attention. That’s when I searched out Home energy efficiency tips and decided to take action to reduce the leaching and keep as much heat inside my house as possible. A total inspection of a home can discover a lot of simple fixes to keep the heat in and the cold air out. One of the little things that I took care of over the weekend was purchasing precut foam insulation to install in all the electrical sockets. It cost less than $20 and only took about 30 minutes to unscrew the cover plates, drop in the insulation and then re-attach the cover plates.

For bigger jobs, like insulating the fireplace covering and adding more insulation to the attic or crawl space, there are home insulation contractors who can help. I don’t know very much about insulation and can’t afford to waste it or do it incorrectly, so I would defer to the professionals for a job like that.

My son is working a second job to bring in more money. He is delivering newspapers, yet he is not a “paperboy.” He doesn’t drive up and down residential streets throwing papers into driveways. Rather, he goes to apartment buildings, conveniences stores, hotels and grocery stores and delivers bundles of papers to the resellers and the places with vending boxes placed near their cluster mailboxes and other common areas. Most of them are in well lit and patrolled areas, for the safety of their residents.  I feel more comfortable that he is in relatively safe areas, too, except for the convenience stores.

Its been many years since we lived in a condo and had to pick up our mail from the apartment mailboxes that are in a row by the entrance to the garage. In some apartment communities the mailboxes and vending machines are located by the leasing office instead of the garage area. I’m sure you’ve seen some of the mailbox islands, located in the community’s parking lots, too.

Some people in office condos have to retrieve their mail each day from commercial mailboxes in the building lobby or near the parking garage. When i first worked for an insurance company, that is how our mail was delivered.  The only downside of that was we could not tell when the mail had actually arrived without going out to the mailboxes and looking inside. But somehow we managed.

Rain again today. The forecast for tomorrow is rain, too. This is the worst thing about winter- the perpetual dark, gloomy sky and bitter cold rain. Not only is it overcast and depressing, but the change back to standard time means that it is totally dark outside when I get off work, so I am driving home in the dark.

The good thing about a wet winter is that we almost always need the rain and it helps replenish the water levels so that we do not have a drought next summer. I remember a couple of years ago the water shortage was so bad that I had to install rain chains on the house and the garage to conserve rain water for the garden and the lawn.

With enough chains rain accumulates in a barrel or other collector and can be used when needed. The chains have a practical use but they can also be decorative. I picked out brass chains that match the hardware on the doors of my house and the fence gates.

Wish I could say that I was the first one in my neighborhood to install a rain chain, but one of my neighbors beat me to it. I had been thinking about it and then one day I drove the back way to the grocery store and passed his house. Sure enough, he had install chains and collection barrels. So that motivated me even further to go ahead and do it.

Guest post written by my buddy Aldo Mays

I am what some people might call a very light sleeper. While my husband could (perhaps literally) sleep through a sonic boom or a freight train driving straight through our family room, I am awakened by every single creak in the middle of the night. While this is normally a figment of my very active imagination, I love the security of knowing that if any of the noises I hear are ever NOT in my head, I’m protected. Thanks to our security system, any alarm that is activated in our home results in an alarm to our monitoring company. From there, the company calls us and can get our permission to call the appropriate authorities. While I sincerely hope we’ll never have a need for their services, the peace of mind I get simply from knowing the alarm is there if we need it is enough for me. I sleep like a baby. Correction: I would sleep like a baby if I could get my husband to stop stealing all the covers ever single night. While I don’t have a solution for that, I can recommend you check out www.ATLANTAHOMESECURITY.com to see if installing an alarm can help you sleep like a baby, too.