I got my Durham utility bill this week, and my water usage is at an all time low. Suspiciously low.

I've used 4 units of water in the past 6 months (3 billing periods.) Since each unit is 748 gallons, that comes to 2992 gallons over 6 months. I'm not sure of the number of days in each billing cycle, so I guessed I'd come pretty close with (2992 gal. / 365 days) * 2 = 16.39 gal./day.

There's no way my water usage can be that low, can it??

I have been very conservative with my water use habits, and I take a four minute shower every day. I do one load of dishes and one load of laundry every week. I try to be very conservative when using the faucet. I have low-flow toilets and shower head. I let it mellow. But I haven't really gone to extremes like using shower water to flush or using paper plates.

Can this be right?

In any case, yay me. :)

So I was going to go over to Greensboro today to visit with Grandpa and help my Aunt Linda out - Grandma's stomach flu is worse. Only today, I've come up with the bug that's going around. I think I have a fever, as I'm getting chills, but my thermometer ran out of batteries and I can't find my mercury one. My head feels like a mushroom and my throat like sand paper. In any case, there's no way I'd be admitted into an ICU like this.

Roof update: Apparently, whoever did the current roof put the shingles on wrong somehow - or so says the roofer's voice mail. I can do a quick fix for the current issue relatively cheaply, but the problem is bad and needs to be redone. I'm going to get a quote from my roofer soon on that. Can't handle it today.

Sigh.

Update: I appear to have a fever of 102 F. I guess I dont have to worry about going to urgent care until, say, 104, but this is completely miserable. :(

... it pours. Which is almost literal in my case.

This has been one of the cruddiest weeks I can remember having in some time. I am completely overloaded at work, I'm having roof problems and will probably end up having to replace a good portion of the roof, and my Grandpa is in the ICU due to a bad spill he took on Wednesday. He shattered his ulna, which rammed into his metacarpals, screwing up his wrist really badly. It'll require surgery to repair that, but that's on hold now as he also hit his head really hard and has some internal cranial bleeding. We're waiting for more scans of this to see if he'll have to have cranial surgery.

Anyways, here's the roof, which looks less scary in the pictures than it did when I first saw it. A bunch of shingles came loose during one of the wind storms we had this week. The problem is, most of the rest of this section of the roof is equally ready to cut loose.



The good thing about this week was the wonderful support / assistance I've been getting from my friends and neighbors. I live in a great neighborhood.