I wouldn’t use a strong word like hate for these things, but just a little overview of some things that perturbed me this weekend:

1. Our neighbors. They had a cookout at 11:30pm on Saturday night. With their very young children. What?!?

2. The PA fireworks laws. Why do these laws exist if they aren’t enforced? You can’t own or possess fireworks in our fine commonwealth, yet all night on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, all I heard were firecrackers and fireworks. Personally, fireworks don’t really do anything for me, and I find them a bit annoying at 12:00am when I’m trying to sleep, but if you’re not going to enforce the law, why not take it off the books and collect tax revenue from the sales?

3. The weather. I heard all spring how we were going to have a cool, wet summer. Well, they got the wet part right, at least. This humidity has to go, and soon.

4. Equitable Gas. Don’t ever, ever signup for their budget program. It’s great in the winter to spread out your payments when it’s cold (and you live in a house that’s only slightly better insulated than an appliance box), but it’s nothing but trickery in the summers. We were doing the budget program this past winter, and when I was paid for a consulting job, I just paid off our balance since we had the cash. The next month my bill said we had a credit. It looked as if the previous balance that I paid was based on their estimates (which I’ve never understood — “we’re going to bill you based on our guess…so we may owe you money, or you may owe us more money” — what a great business plan!) and I had in fact overpaid. Well, this month we get another huge bill. Not because we’ve used our furnace, but because we had a budget credit, not a real credit with them. So even though our bills looked like we shouldn’t be paying anything (I was fooled by the Current Balance: $0.00 at the bottom of our bills), that was just some new math on their part with our budget balance. Whatever.

Posted on 7 July 2003