In Dante’s Inferno, hell is a funnel with nine circles. Each circle holds worse sinners than the one above it. It starts with Limbo. Virtuous non-Christians and unbaptized souls, such as Homer, Virgil, and Socrates live here. There’s no torment here, only an eternal longing for God. Then there’s Lust. The lustful are whipped around forever by a violent storm. Many of us live here and we men, especially, shrug and explain this one away as nature governing our souls. Right after that there’s Gluttony. Gluttons lie in freezing, filthy slush, guarded by Cerberus, probably eating potato chips and ice cream. That’s followed by Greed, which seems to me like it should be lower on the pecking order but its where hoarders and spendthrifts push heavy boulders against each other, forever. Wrath is next where the angry fight in the swamp of the River Styx, while the sullen are stuck gurgling beneath it. A sign of Dante’s religion-dominated times (the early Fourteenth Century), the next level is for Heresy and heretics are locked inside flaming tombs. That era was a very violent one (think Dark Ages) so we then descend into Violence. This circle has three sub-rings: violence against others (boiled in a river of blood), against oneself (turned into trees), and against God, nature, and art (a burning desert under raining fire…sounds a bit like Burning Man). The eight level is about Fraud, which I wonder if Donald Trump is aware. Ten ditches hold different kinds of deceivers, including flatterers (many of them Republicans, I imagine), corrupt officials (more Republicans), hypocrites (also Republicans), thieves, and false counselors (Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito?). And then the lowest level is Hell is where Treachery lives. Traitors are frozen in Cocytus, a lake of ice. At the center, Satan chews on Judas, Brutus, and Cassius, to whom Dante would like add Hitler and Trump. The logic of the system is that sins of weakness (circles 2–5) are punished less severely than sins of malice, and fraud ranks worst because it misuses human reason, the faculty that sets us apart. That’s why traitors sit at the very bottom.
Claude, who is aware of my recent travails with my homeowner’s insurance and the FAIR plan has, on its own, suggested that if I’m putting five-hour FAIR Plan hold times somewhere, Dante would probably create a new ditch in the eighth circle for them. But I need to go further than that. I am currently in retired person’s infrastructure Hell and I think Dante needs an addendum for a new 10th level.
My list of projects at the moment read like a modern version of Torquemada’s torture chamber for homeowner’s. I have four fundamental infrastructure circles (I’m going with the Dante construct). Those are power, propane, water and insurance. Once I converted from Amerigas to Lava Propane (a local company that has not been rolled up in a private equity kluge), my propane issues have gone away. I have a 500 gallon tank that gets filled more or less twice a year and I have WiFi gauge on it that tells me me via an app what level its at and Bob’s your uncle. The only things I use that propane system for are hot tub heating, cooking and my two water heating systems. It’s fair to note that that system interfaces with the water circle in two places, but that hasn’t seemed to come into play in any significant way. So, that the other three circles.
I will start with the water circle. Water is a big deal out here in the west and there is never enough of it. I’m lucky to be living in San Diego County, which seems to have gotten a grip on its water supply system in good order. I use Valley Center Municipal Water and as I detailed not so long ago, I have had several costly leaks that I have had to deal with, generally caused by my spa system (sub-circle #1) and my irrigation system (sub-circle #2). I’ve also had to install a costly leaks detection system for the house water (sub-circle #3). I just had Valley Center Water run off a week’s worth of hourly water usage so that I can check the status of my leak repair. I am pleased to report that the report shows that most hours of the day have no usage (that means no big system leak anymore) and the bulk of the usage comes from my irrigation system use (88%) and that only amounted to a weekly cost of about $67 or an approximate monthly bill of $275, which is very much in keeping with my neighbors and one third of what I was paying when I had the active leak. That was all good news. While my irrigation and house sub-circles are in fine order, I still suspect my spa system has issues, but at least it isn’t showing up in my water bill. Bottom line, I am no presently in any of the sub-circles of Water Hell.
The power circle also has a number of sub-circles. There is the A/C (sub-circle #1), the EV (sub-circle #2) and the solar system (sub-circle #3). I recently had an A/C failure, but my friends at ASI, who are still stinging from my recent threats to leave them, which they took seriously…meaning I must pay way too much to them…fixed the problem at no cost and the system seems to be working just fine during what is now a particularly hot spell (expected to be 100 over the whole weekend). The EV sub-circle recently went on the fritz for Kim’s charger and after having Mercedes tell us the issue was not with the car, I set out to work with ChargePoint to figure out how to get her system back online. Last night that did not seem possible, but with a new day today I tried again and was instructed to perform the highly complex procedure of turning off the breakers for two minutes. If the breakers were in an easy to access spot that would be simple, but I have to move a trellis for that particular breaker on the outside of the garage. I did that this morning and, voila!, the system rebooted and the charger started working again. Now why Kim’s charger would go offline and mine, which is on the same breaker line, would not, is beyond me, but such are the quirks of modern electronics. So, I’ve managed to exit that sub-circle of Power Hell successfully.
I was recently called by a solar installation company with a proposal to add to my solar system on a leased basis. Their proposal involves an increase of 2X of my solar array (basically using up the rest of my open roof space) plus the addition of four new Tesla batteries to supplant the two I already have. They would then enter into a 25-year lease arrangement that would have me paying a set amount with a 3.5% escalation. The number they proposed was about half of what I pay on average now, using my SDG&E billing history as the guide. I was immediately wary of the proposal and put it through Claude for advice. He gave me lots of things to question, but the bet part was that when I put all the data into the system, I learned that my existing solar array had stopped working in early July putting me out of the solar game for the sunniest months of the summer. My estimate is that that little boo-boo and oversight has cost me over $2,000 and it jacked my electric bill such that it grossly inflated the numbers used for the new proposal. It also caused me to ask Claude to analyze my power usage and he told me that while I am a high user (thanks mostly to A/C and EV use), I am not so out of line for local homeowners. Now I have a repair ticket in with Baker Home Energy to come out and fix/reboot my system to get it back online. That means that as I write this I am very much in Power Hell (sub-circle #3), pending resolution. What I don NOT plan to do yet is enter sub-circle #4 by signing a 25-year unbreakable lease obligation that will make a timeshare deal seem like a cakewalk.
I will not detail the fourth new circle of Hell (Insurance), which I am still wallowing in, but will do so after I progress to some resolution of that whole morass. So, for the moment, live from Power Hell and Insurance Hell, I remain Dante’s loyal modern chronicler and addendum writer.