PECO CAP Program - Schmooze deli in Jenkintown

Neil Fletcher came out at 10 am to check my house for leaks. Leaks of energy. He also itemized how much electricity and gas I use.

He was shocked by the low amount of gas and electricity I use.

I never use my dishwasher. I'm one person, after all.

And the dryer? It's costly. I hang up all my clothes on a drying rack.

Can I give you some low wattage light bulbs, he asked me. (They're called CFL, the compact fluorescent lamp).

Nope. I've got all I need. They'll expire long after I do. Been about 3 years since I changed a bulb.

He told me some interesting facts.

My fridge uses $12 a month worth of electricity.

My fans, a cheapskate's best friend, use barely any energy, same with my laptop and desktop. I religiously turn off all lights when I'm not in the room.

Like most people my number one expense is the A/C in the summer and the furnace in the winter.

Maximum A/C efficiency, said Neil, is turning your AC to 75.

My eyeballs would freeze if I did dat. I keep it at 81, but of course my fan is whirring efficiently next to me here in the living room.

Remember the days of the oil embargo and gasoline shortage, back during the Jimmy Carter years?

We were advised to keep our thermostats to a bone-chilling 58 degrees.

Then one year my furnace began to die. I was too busy to call the furnace man - I worked as a therapist at Bristol-Bensalem - so I slept on the futon in Sarah's old bedroom, the warmest room in the house.

I did write my famous poem "The Furnace Man" which is somewhere among the rubble.

This is a test Neil ran, same as 2 yrs ago, I believe when a man named Terry came out to the house and insulated the attic. Oh dear, I must tell you when I used to get psychotic I thot there were dead babies in the attic. Oy yoy yoy! Glad I sloughed off that old skin.

Not only that, but I believed predators were coming into the basement via a small locked wooden hatch out back. If you've never been psychotic, you have no idea how real this seems or how utterly terrifying!

Neil's huge fan expelled air from my house. Then he took a reading.

I asked Neil, who lives in Flourtown - Pillsbury or Sarasota? - and who uses FB to see his new g'daughter in W VA, to tell me a weird story about his travels.

Ready? He drives out to Downingtown. His 5-yo Pontiac SUV has 140,000 miles on it and PECO don't reimburse him for wear and tear - he keeps his lunch and water inside - for lunch today he'll have a bottle of water and a peach. Ever read James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl?

So he drives down this winding road way out in the sticks, and the homeowner waves at him.

C'mon out back, he says.

Take a look at my wife. 

For sure, I'm thinking the wife is naked, doing a raindance. But she's doing something even stranger.

She saves up rotten meat and feeds the vultures.

They're big ugly things, said Fletcher.

Here's a story in the Intell about a plague of vultures in Bucks County and how the town got rid of em.

 

Neil made recommendations for some insulation in the crawl space and for window trims around four of my windows to keep the house insulated.

In my opinion, it's a total waste of money. I asked if I could possibly have a new ceiling fan - mine is useless - but he said they don't fund em.

According to the literature he gave me, a ceiling fan makes the room 4 percent cooler. Um, can you really feel that?

Well, by now I was hongry. My sugar was good - 118 - so I headed down to The Fairway to eat at Schmooze, the deli which is in the same location as the defunct Murray's, but it's much larger. You sit at tables far away from your neighbors.

I used to schmooze with people sitting near me in the old Murray's, but I barely talked to a soul. I can vividly remember a conversation I had at the counter with a roofer. He told me his company did the roof of the White House and other bldgs in our nation's capital.

Great! I just goggled 'roof of white house' and will probly spend the rest of my life at Guantanomo.



He reached into his wallet and flashed me his security clearance. There was no reason not to believe him.

But his wife, who sat beside him at the counter at Murray's, had dementia and was getting worse and worse. It was heartbreaking, he said, but would always take c/o her.

Murray's had nice artwork. Posters by great artists like Matisse and Grace Catherine Deming.

One of those humongous menus, interspersed with ads.

Nate was my handsome waiter. He fixed me of a platter of my desires. Is this sexism if you call a waiter handsome?

We start out with chopped liver, that was quite good, and tongue, which was surprisingly salty - oh, I forgot, it's a cold cut - but was quite good.

Then the unmanageable Reuben sandwich with special sauce and sauerkraut arrived. Simply impossible to eat. I ate half of it. I'd injected 10 into my arm, but will go on bike after this blog. Hopefully there's something good on telly.

Lemme check. I'll pass on Clifford the Big Red Dog, but there's some Well-Read Show on, so I'll watch that. You can only bike a little after the hour or the half, but never in the minutes before. Otherwise, you are trapped in a web of horrific commercials.

I had a window seat so I could watch the drama of people going in and out of their cars - old people with humped backs crexing along - holding their equally decrepit life partners by the arm. See the two Mercedes?

I left half my sandwich on the plate. Bill was $19 I think, with a $5 tip for Nate. Would I come back? Yes, with my mom, who hopefully will pay the bill.