Today in mountain folk:

You've probably noticed that I'm somewhat biased against PG&E and--huh? You haven't? Because I am and--what's that? That's PG&E? Pacific Gas & Electric? Never heard of them? Lucky you. 

To be clear, my beef is with the higher ups at PG&E and not the workers.
They're great and I very much hope they continue to come fix our power
lines during the frequent--like seriously frequent--power outages. 

Santa Cruz is far too unimportant to
nuke, so here's a New York map.

I may have mentioned previously that I live in Santa Cruz, California. Well that is a lie. I technically live about twenty minutes outside of Santa Cruz, in the mountains. Not because I like living in nature, because I don't. I hate it. But because Santa Cruz is a sleepy beach town with Manhattan-level rent and the only place I can keep my housing costs under 70% of my income is to live outside of Santa Cruz proper. My go to example is a Cold War nuclear blast radius map. If the downtown is ground zero for rent, I live in the slow death by radiation poison zone.

Where I'm going with this is that in the various mountain towns outside Santa Cruz, an aging, and ill-conceived electrical infrastructure means that my power goes out. A lot. The power lines are among the trees which is fine as long as there's never, you know, weather of any kind. Spoiler alert: we get weather.

Pictured: my street, last time there was weather.

Pictured: us, dreaming of that
fancy e-lectricity them city folk have.

For those of us mountain folk, reliable electricity is but a dream. So imagine my chagrin when I read the company has requested and gotten permission for a price increase. The California Public Utilities Commission approved a rate hike of 12.8% to pay for safety measures. Safety measures like burying the power lines that should probably have been buried at literally any point after the 1920's or whenever they were first run up here. 

And, I don't know, maybe I'm just a cheapskate, but I kind of resent having to pay for the electric company's poor planning. The same company and same poor planning that blew up a neighborhood in 2010 and caused several fires over the years, including the Camp Fire in 2018 that killed like eighty people and destroyed hundreds of homes. Maybe instead of passing the costs on to us they could look into cutting executive pay or something? 

"Or, we could, you know, not do that..."

-PG&E execs, seen here smoking 

celebratory cigars which would

 later cause another fire