Today was full of errands. The car needed to be serviced, the appointment was for this morning, Attila was at work, which leaves me to take the car in. While the car was getting its beauty treatment I walked to the bank and spent an hour with a representative doing a wee bit of complex banking. That done, it was off to the town hall to buy garbage stickers. It costs $2.00 to put out one bag of garbage for pickup on garbage day, if the tags are purchased at the town hall. If the tags are purchased at third party retail establishments, the cost is $2.50 per bag of garbage. We try to put one bag out every two weeks, even though there is weekly collection, to cut down on expenses. Using a composter has helped with that, since we eat a lot of fresh vegetables and fruit, the scraps are recycled right here at home. We also recycle most of the rest of our garbage. It helped a lot as well when we purchased the Big Berkey, which filters our tap water for drinking, so we do not need to buy water in plastic bottles or containers. We don’t buy them, so we don’t have to throw them out.
It was a grand day for it, to be out and walking about downtown while the car was in the shop. The sunshine and above freezing temperature were a real treat. It is extremely windy though, so much so that occasionally the house shakes at the gusts. The weather report said winds gusting to 70, and I think they might have been even stronger than that!
This morning I had the unpleasant task of dealing with our internet company. Our latest bill suddenly increased by $350! There has been no change in our usage, but they claimed we went way, way, way over our limit. There was no arguing that point, they were adamant. After an hour or more on the telephone with them, we ended up only having to pay about $20 more than our regular bill, which was quite pleasing. They had no explanation at all about how this sudden spike occurred. I am suspicious though, because on the heels of this outrageous bill came an email offering to upgrade our service to unlimited, for only $30 a month more. We are not going to do that. It turns out they did send messages alerting us to the overuse, but they sent it to the email address they had setup for us on their service, which we do not use, and not to the email address on record with the account, where I would have seen it. All in all I am pretty unhappy with Cogeco. I will be logged in every single day to watch our usage and see what is going on!
Switching service providers is a miserable process, but I am sorely tempted!
That part of my day behind me, I have been sitting in the living room, enjoying the sunshine streaming in the windows, contemplating what I might like for a late lunch!
Worldly Distractions
Weather
6°C
Date: 12:00 PM EST Wednesday 8 March 2017
Condition: Partly Cloudy
Pressure: 100.7 kPa
Tendency: Falling
Temperature: 6.4°C
Dew point: 1.5°C
Humidity: 71%
Wind: SSW 33 gust 44 km/h
Visibility: 24 km
Increasing cloudiness. 40 percent chance of showers late this afternoon. Wind southwest 30 km/h gusting to 50 increasing to 50 gusting to 70 early this afternoon. High 7. UV index 3 or moderate.
Quote
“The love of truth lies at the root of much humor.”
Robertson Davies
To my mind, it makes for the best kind of humor!
Wow. Naughty internet company! I had to spent way too much time on the phone yesterday with veriz0n as I got an email from them which I wasn’t sure was real or a scam! I finally called them (ugh) and it took FOR-ever to get a real person – when I did, he was located in India somewhere I believe. He said it was real, that veriz0n was melding in with aol now and I needed to do stuff… which I finally did, very reluctantly… I could just smell a scam-rat somewhere, but in the end, it WAS real so I am now all set again. But Geesh!
Hey luvvie, your Calendar of Wisdom link is a dead end. I still miss John Bailey too! -Kate
Glad to hear it was real Bex! It is getting a bit harder to stay safe on the internet highway! Being cautious seems to take a lot of time and effort!
Thanks Kate! I wonder when that link went south! It is fixed now. That site needs more work, got to finish my book before I get started on it again. Lots to do!
I think about John and Graham from time to time, and wish them well wherever they are and whatever they are doing. His health was not great when he petered out on the blog and twitter, so I wonder.
The winds have been incredible here, today! At 11 the airport reported a gust of 87kph! LOL, Repeating myself about the wind.
Hmmmm… With your internet usage, any chance someone could be tapping into your line? Or if you have wifi, could someone have gotten your password and tapped in? Movies and music seem to be the big drains on usage, or downloading/uploading lots of really large pictures.
Teri, the winds are ferocious here too, although I don’t know how strong they are, they seem more extreme than I have experienced here before. The wind destroyed the tarp we had placed over Iris the trailer to protect her from the snow.
I thought of that, someone tapping on our line, so I am going to keep an eye on it daily, we do have a “basement nerd” in the neighbourhood, close enough to find our service. The only thing we could think of was our new Amazon Prime video service, but we used it the other months as well and they were below the limit, so it remains a mystery. I have adjusted the account settings to forward all mail to the cogeco email address to my personal email address, so that if there are any alerts they will show up where I will see them. That was really nasty of them, to setup an email account (I didn’t set it up) and then to send all of their missives to it, ignoring the email I provided them when I setup the account, where I would have seen the alerts. Oh well, I am exploring other providers, it is a big job to switch, lots of timing involved and we might have to purchase hardware, not a job I am going to take on just at the moment!
Forgot to comment on your garbage topic. Over here, this week our city is going to a new garbage protocol. We’re moving from unlimited bags plus recycle pick up each week to weekly recycle and every other week bagged garbage. We’re only allowed one free bag of garbage every other week – which is fortunately no problem for us. After that, esch additional bag is $2 and you have to buy the tags and tie the bag with them. It’s a HUGE change for us but fortunately not a problematic change.
Yes, that was quite the game with Cogeco setting up an email for you instead of using the email you provided them. Hopefully, you can figure out where these outrageous charges are coming from.
Teri, that is a huge change, having one bag free every two weeks is good though. At the country house we had garbage pickup and blue box pickup every two weeks, and were allowed a maximum of two garbage bags free, no more. If you had more garbage than the two bags you had to drive it to the dump and pay to leave there. Because we pay $2 per bag of garbage here at Mist Cottage, we used to bring any garbage we created at Mist Cottage to the country house, where we could put it out for free. Now that option is gone for us, so we pay $2 for every bag of garbage. We seldom put a bag of garbage out two weeks in a row, it is usually every other week.
I have my eye on Cogeco, that is for sure, it was pretty underhanded to send the notices to an different email address than I provided for the account. Companies that play “gotcha” are not ones I want to continue to do business with. Sears was another company that played that game with us, selling us a service package, telling us our money would be refunded if we didn’t need any service, and then when the time came insisting that they send us a coupon for a discount on a purhase over $500 for the amount we spent on the service package, that would expire within a few months. When I mentioned that that isn’t what we were told when we made the purchase, she laughed and said, it is in the fine print! That was a gotcha, we buy NOTHING from Sears now. When we get rid of Cogeco, who knows when, we won’t be dealing with them again.