"Oyate" he said, "you are lucky to be poor".

 

Hey wait a minute, I'm one of the best technology project managers money can buy! I got two houses, one of them I can't go into because my adorable wife will chase me out with the shotgun I bought her.

 

But Aaron said, in that voice of his, that tough Brooklyn Jew voice,

 

"Oyate, all my rich friend hate their wives and their wives hate them. Their kids hate them. They come home, they come in the door, the dog hates them, trust me Oyate, you are better off poor".

 

OK just a couple other jokes before I get down to serious stuff. Aw, screw it, I'll tell the jokes later.

 

The reason I'm here to talk to you today is I have had it up to here with the Rockwellians and rich, pillow-assed, pompous jerks who say "buy my book and I will tell you how to survive" and their survival mechanisms are like "take a gazillion dollars, buy a farm and a missile silo and tons of servants and Bob's your uncle".

 

Thanks Mr. Rockwellian gazillionaire. What about the rest of us? So this is like an introduction to a series called "piss poor patriot" and to start out, I'm going to give you two pieces in one.

 

The first is called "bucket bath" and the second is called "hot or cold, make up your mind".

 

Bucket bath.

 

Your hot water heater keeps hot water hot all the time whether you use it or not. By essence, it is a device of convenience, not efficiency. It is there to provide hot water whenever you want it, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.

 

OK, the first thing you have to do is STOP WANTING HOT WATER ALL THE TIME. And almost everything I am ever going to say to you involves CHANGING YOUR LIFESTYLE but I'm gonna go easy on you and do it incrementally.

 

Now for myself, I don't have to show up at an office every morning so what I do is I gang up all the washing for one day of the week. I fire up the hot water heater and I wash me, the clothes, the dishes, the dog, everything in one swell foop. But I have discovered I can conveniently bathe in between times by bucket-bathing.

 

All I do is grab my biggest pot and fill it with water and heat it on the stove and with like 1/10th as much propane, I can get a nice hot wash. I just take the put of hot water into the tub and use a wash cloth and with just 3 gallons of water, I can wash, lather, rinse, repeat. I plan to make a video of it one day so you get the dubious thrill of seeing Oyate naked as a jaybird because in the summer time, I wash outside.

 

But by doing this, you can cut at least $20 a month off your electric bill. Or your propane. And our studies show that for your delivered thermal unit, electricity is cheaper just now.

 

OK that was bucket bath. Now for "Hot or cold, make up your mind".

 

Have you ever noticed that winter comes so you heat up your house but then you want to keep food around so you set up a cool zone (refridgerator) inside of your hot zone? Does it make any intuitive sense to you to heat a house but then have a micro-climate of cool inside it when outside, there's all the cool you want?

 

Go ahead, hit Oyte with a pie in the face when I tell you something so simple.

 

UNPLUG THE REFRIGERATOR IN WINTER. KEEP YOUR PERISHABLES IN COOLERS OUTSIDE THE DOOR.

 

THE WHOLE PLANET IS YOUR REFRIDGERATOR IN THE WINTER.

 

So I did. I just unplugged the fridge this winter. The impoartance of the cooler cannot be underestimated because there are things like mayonaiese that you would rather not freeze, so keeping everything at optimal temperature sometimes has to do with keeping the lid of the cooler OPEN during the day time so it actually ACCUMULATES some heat. Because coolers work both ways: they can maintain heat or cold.

 

And how do you monitor the heat or cold in your coolers? You use a thermometer, that's how. $5 at Walmart. You just check it a couple times a day.

 

Savings on unplugging the fridge? About $20 a month.

 

So if you are reading, I just shaved $40 a month off your electric bill in winter. But just get this into your head: you were previously making a warm house to put a cold fridge in. Do you see how fundamentally stupid that is when you get cold for free?

 

OK that was "make up your mind"

 

Next comes line-drying your laundry. The whole planet you live on is a massive water recycling machine. This planet drinks water from the ground it drinks it from the air. How stupid do you feel now that you have been wasting money doing what the planet does for free again? Line dry your clothes.

 

Know how much electricity it takes to make heat? Heat comes from electricity by a function know as RESISTENCE. We make use of this by making electrons go someplace they basically don't want to go, and they get all bottled up and bothered and they expend their outrage by making heat. It a grossely inefficient process and we can't imagine the electrons are too happy about it either. Which you wouldn't think of as having feelings, but it's really imporant because our people sometimes return to this Earth as clouds or lightning after we die.

 

But let's review what we have so far: you can shave $20 with bucket bath, you can shave $20 in the winter when the Earth makes cold and you can shave $20 by something I haven't told you yet. Which I should tell you now becuase I'm not selling a book. I want you to be well and happy.

 

In winter, you with the 2000 foot homes and above, just take some plastic sheeting and ilosate your thermozone. You only use about 500 square feet on a daily basis. Just sheet off half the house that doesn't have water in it and let it freeze for the winter. Consult your local trusty tradesman because we might want to "winterize" half your house which means we drain all the water out of it, but from a hot-water heating perspective, all we gotta do is install a valve or two. That's it. Total cost? About $100. How much can this save you?

 

Hundreds dude.

 

For more information about how we can save your ass with common sense, get in touch with Fred Smart. We're thinking about doing a consulting company to teach you how to reduce your footprint, re-align your investments, save your house and while we will package it as a "consultancy", I'm not sure we're interested in making money so much as we're interested in saving lives.

 

We're not here to charge you money, we're here to make you money.

 

Just another fringe benefit of being a fringer. Yeah, we have our own. We have our own everything. And we take care of our own.