and then kate

I must say, I was rather taken aback when I received the following Home Energy Report in the mail last week.

Actually, I wasn’t only taken aback. I’d say I went through several stages of reaction. I’ll openly admit that the first stage was pride and perhaps a little self-congratulation. We, the people in this apparently rampant-with-energy-greed household, are above average! A full 114% above average! Not everyone can make that claim, you know! Particularly not those crunchy hippies with their REUSABLE SHOPPING BAGS and AIR-DRIED CLOTHING and GOVERNMENT-APPROVED ENERGY-EFFICIENT APPLIANCES.

Then I realized we were those hippies. So I moved on to the embarrassment stage, which I believe was probably the main objective of this nifty line graph:

As I ran around turning out lights and pulling the television plug right in the middle of Aura’s nightly viewing of The Electric Company, I began to panic. Did all my neighbors get this same report? On their reports, was it noted that #19, that house up on the hill, was totally skewing the neighborhood average? Were there forcible suggestions that maybe the people at #19 should not be invited to any more neighborhood BBQs and, also, that little girl whose balls periodically roll down the hill into their yards? KICK HER. As I stood there in our kitchen, now eerily silent thanks to the newly unplugged refrigerator, and listened to the sounds of Aura fumbling her way through the darkness, I couldn’t help but wonder.

The embarrassment eventually gave way to anxiety and fury and a bunch of other emotions I typically reserve for Senate campaigns and the American Idol results show. By the time last weekend rolled around, I was terrified to even drive through the neighborhood, slumping low in the driver’s seat as I waited for the sound of compact fluorescent bulbs pelting my windows.

Honestly, I’m stupefied. Our heat is oil. We cook with natural gas. Sure, I run the washer and dryer a lot, but what can I say, besides that we’re evidently a sloppy lot? We’re pretty good about turning out lights when we’re not in a room, and we rarely forget to power down our laptops. And for heaven’s sake, I can barely remember where the vacuum is, never mind USE it.

All I can come up with? The fans. We all have fans next to our beds for white noise. It started with me in college, then I passed on the addiction to Adam, and we collectively helped Aura develop her own dependence. We even hooked my mother, who has been living with us for several weeks. It’s like Fan Central here. One can only imagine the furrowed brows of the electric company officials, huddled as they surely are around our file, perplexed by the fact that our energy usage actually goes up at night instead of down.

Poor patsies. They’ll never figure this one out. Well, they might, once our house is the catalyst for the blackout of the Northeast corridor. But for now? I think we’ll sleep just fine, our fans drowning out the sounds of neighbors rioting outside. They can stomp their Birkenstocks as loud as they want. We won’t hear a thing.