Climatology

Besides being really kind of In-Your-Face, the weather here is also expensive. There is of course the ridiculous expenses of running your AC from about May to September, but there are also a multitude of hidden costs that I had never really considered before moving here. Take our siding for instance.

For those Dutch readers who just went "si-what?", siding is the stuff that goes on the side of your house. Very practical term, pretty much on a par with quarter rounds. Anyway. no matter what type of siding you have, it's a guarantee that its color will fade. At least on whichever part of your house gets hit by sunlight. And it will fade fast. I mean, we're talking a new coat of paint at least every five to ten years. That is if you have wood, like we do. If you're the (un) lucky owner (opinions are divided on this one) of a house with vinyl siding, the fading may take a little longer, but in the end, the sun will win, and you will be putting new siding on your house, unless, of course, you revel in being the neighborhood pariah with faded trim and discolored wood.

But if that was it, it wouldn't be too bad. I mean, I like painting, I can so do our house, I'm not worried about it. But you see, that's not it. Because next to being ridiculously sunny and bright pretty much all year round, Georgia is also really humid, and moist, and wet. And there is nothing sexy about it either. Because not only does this mean that hanging laundry outside to dry will do little to accomplish that feat, it also means that the sides of your house that get little or no sun grow moldy really quickly. And I mean really moldy. Moldy as in people who don't clean it off on a regular basis are bigger pariahs than people who don't paint their siding every so often. Nothing will bring a house value down faster than a nasty-looking house down the street.
Now how does one get rid of said mold? Well, you powerwash your house. That is really not the problem. The problem lies in how often do you have to do that. Because if you don't like your house looking like a showercurtain in a male dorm, about once a year. And guess when you have to do this? Not in the summer, when five minutes outdoors will give you a heat stroke, no you get to play with ice cold water in the winter! Life is fun! So this winter, we powerwashed our house for the first time. And it scored very low on Dixiechick's scale of fun activities. The water is freezing. The jet is so powerful, it will take the skin off your legs (accidental experimental testing confirmed this finding as significant), and cleaning all the nooks and crannies around your various dormers and porches means you spend about three hours practicing a wide array of yoga poses on a ten-foot ladder.

But as far as money goes, powerwashing isn't too bad. Just recently, I discovered the real kicker: our blinds. The blinds on the front of the house look as good as new. Granted, they're the twenty dollar kind from Walmart (I think), but, they could pass for the fifty dollar kind, if you know what I mean. However, the blinds in the back are a disgrace. The sun beats down on them every single day, and in the past eighteen months, they have just started to disintegrate. It starts with a small crack. Then a piece will break off, then another piece, and before you know it, your blinds aren't really blind as much as they are one-eyed freaks. The upside is that I've been wanting new blinds since we moved. I want those blinds with the really wide slats. But do I really want to spend hundreds of dollars on something that is going to be cracking (and fading) within a few years? And I know I could get wooden blinds. In fact, that would be a far more practical thing to do; they're easier to clean, they don't break and crack as easily, and they look nice. But you know, if we get those, we may have to tell one of our kids that they won't be getting a meal plan when they go to college. Seriously. Therefore, so far, I've been taping the slats back together. Yes. DixieChick spends considerable amounts of time cutting off tiny pieces of tape just big enough to tape the missing pieces back together so no one can see it.
I know. Who in their right spends all that time taping up fifteen dollar blinds? Apparently, only I do. It's silly, I know. But I just have a real problem spending money on new blinds if the old ones would have been fine if it weren't for the sun beating down on them all. day. long.

So, I'm telling you, hot weather is expensive. And dangerous too.