Sunday Musings — A Moment of Quiet Appreciation for Basic Services

avatar

Much of the time, I don't we really realize the importance and impact of the daily basic services in our lives until we reach a point where we suddenly have to do without them.

0449-Icicles.JPG

Our central house heater broke earlier this week, and gradually we got to feeling the chilly edge of northwestern winter on the inside of our house.

Ultimately, being without a bit of heat is not that great in disaster. After all, we can put a fire in the fireplace and it provides some semblance of heat (at least in one room), we can use the whole house fan to at least circulate the air even if it doesn't heat it.

But after four days of occasionally building fires, wearing extra sweaters and living in 58-59 degrees (about 14C) instead of 68 degrees you get to appreciate just how convenient it is to have reliable automatic heat.

0021-Mountains.jpg

I think back to some of the earlier occasions this winter when storms would blow trees on the power lines and we'd be without power, sometimes for close to 24 hours. Again, we're perfectly capable of making do, but we were still reminded of how nice it was to have lights and Internet all the time.

So Patrick — a friend of our son in law's — came by and I had a look at our heater today. He's a "free agent" and does these things mostly on a moonlighting basis. He determined that we needed to have some capacitors replaced and managed to rig us up with fundamental "emergency heat" until those parts could be ordered and installed.

"This will work just fine for now," he said, "but since it's running on all-electrics it's a lot more expensive than you'd normally expect... but we'll get the other one up and running soon."

So our house is once again pretty nice and warm and livable.

0338-Stones.JPG

Meanwhile, it looks like my worst fears of us having to fork out a couple of thousand dollars for major repairs on our heating system — which, after all, dates back to 2005 — are thankfully not going to come to pass.

Regardless, the whole incident makes me pause for a moment to just have some basic gratitude for the fact that our basic services are working once again. And, how it behooves us to not take too many of these modern conveniences for granted.

There are a lot of things in life we can "perfectly well manage without having," but that doesn't mean that they aren't nice to have!

0382-Silhouette.JPG

Meanwhile, I have started on the somewhat tedious process of preparing our annual income tax returns. As usual, it's a somewhat complex process that's gonna take a couple of weeks... all for the purpose of (basically) documenting that we actually didn't make enough money to worry about.

At times, I pause and wonder why I even bother, and then I remind myself that a copy of a filed income tax return is what we need to send to an application to a different set of tax authorities... which amounts to fancy language for the reality that one of the benefits of getting older around here is that we can get a property tax reduction because I reached the ripe old age of 61 during 2021... meaning that "the powers that be" have determined that we are now of an age where we are allowed to exempt ourselves from paying things like school taxes and similar services that we — at our age — essentially derive no benefit from.

0449-Japanese.JPG

Although I'm inclined to agree with many of the people who stand by the mantra "taxation is theft," I'm at least grateful that we not only get to reduce our tax burden, but by going through this protracted process of filling out a somewhat lengthy application it will also freeze our property tax valuation base for six years.

A handy thing, in a real estate market where prices are rising 15-20% a year, and many of our financial woes are precisely due to the fact that our assessed value has tripled since 2011.

Ah, the joy of growing old!

In the meantime, I'm gonna enjoy the warmth coming out of the vents and try to get a good night's sleep!

Thanks for stopping by, and have a great week ahead!

How about YOU? Do you ever reflect on how nice it is to have your basic services in life? What would you miss MOST, if you suddenly had to be without? Comments, feedback and other interaction is invited and welcomed! Because — after all — SOCIAL content is about interacting, right? Leave a comment — share your experiences — be part of the conversation!

HivePanda.gif


Greetings bloggers and social content creators! This article was created via PeakD, a blogging application that's part of the Hive Social Content Experience. If you're a blogger, writer, poet, artist, vlogger, musician or other creative content wizard, come join us! Hive is a little "different" because it's not run by a "company;" it operates via the consensus of its users and your content can't be banned, censored, taken down or demonetized. And that COUNTS for something, in these uncertain times! So if you're ready for the next generation of social content where YOU retain ownership and control, come by and learn about Hive and make an account!

Proud member of the Silver Bloggers Community on Hive! PHC Logo

(As usual, all text and images by the author, unless otherwise credited. This is original content, created expressly and uniquely for this platform — NOT cross posted anywhere else!)
Created at 20220207 00:45 PST

0491/1737



0
0
0.000
0 comments