Mosquito Eater

All the cushions for the outdoor sectional on our porch, which we inherited from the sellers, are now in our living room while we contemplate what to do with our porch. The cushions are new, paid for by our insurance after the old ones were ruined during the fire. We are experimenting with different arrangements of the furniture and contemplating putting a table and chairs out there.

While I was moving cushions out to the porch, I took a picture of what we call a Mosquito Hawk. They are quite harmless and oh so spindly, but if they eat mosquitoes, I really don’t care where they hang out.

The whole exercise really did produce some deja vu .The debate over whether to claim fire and smoke damage from our insurance, the fact that we paid for this insurance for fifty years and this was perhaps the second claim we’d made, the guilt that house didn’t burn down when so many did....all because of a few porch chair cushions. Now we have new cushions but we’re not sure we want to keep the chairs....

As we moved furniture and cushions hither and thither, we discussed investing in solar panels and a storage battery. As our power company, Pacific Gas &Electric sends us endless warnings that they will preemptively turn off our power if weather conditions warrant it, we keep discussing the fact that that would leave us without water as well.

Today we got a notice , accompanied by many graphs, informing us that we used more power than the average house our size last year.

OilMan actually said that if installing solar panels and a battery would mean we had power and water, he would definitely consider it. Then he said ‘I wish we knew how much longer we will live....’ I was unable to convince him (yet) that the point was not how much it would pay out for us, but what kind of legacy we would be leaving for our grandchildren....