Lifestyles of the rich and powerless

Staying in our second vacation rental home for the summer, I am noticing yet again how different this home is from ours. Yes, it's a vacation home, in a different town, with owners who don't live here year-round. So there are bound to be some differences. Plus this time we are staying with my family and wanted a spacious place, but I don't think I realized just how big this place would be. I think the garage alone is about equal in square footage to my house. We brought Adelaide's scooter and she could sail around in there for a long time before needing to turn around. Everywhere we turn there is another bathroom, which will be good when there are lots of us here trying to get ready, but has been kind of laughable while only 3 of us are here. In fact, my brother pointed out, we have adjoining bathrooms upstairs. And all of the bathrooms have 2 or more sinks.

Of the three tables to choose from for our meals, we have only used two for eating. The third is in what I have dubbed "The Boardroom," and this morning we used it for our office. I was planning on posting but only got as far as getting photos off the camera before the CEO (pictured below) had other plans for me.The scale of everything is intense here, too. I suppose you need big furniture to fill up big rooms, but there is some seriously big stuff in here. The television is larger than my dining room table would be if I turned it on its side. I let Adelaide watch a video for a while today but was afraid her brain might get sucked out of her head if she looked at that screen so I used our portable DVD player for safety's sake. After navigating through 2 pages of instructions for the 3 remote controls I discovered that there are 9000 channels on the satellite dish, and nothing to watch. Despite the giant screen, the DVD we played last night didn't quite fit right in the frame so the subtitles for the portions which were in Spanish were cut off at the bottom. Good thing we understand French, so we could piece it together.

The whole family could all sit on the sectional couch at once without having to touch one another. Or we could sit in the other living room. Or the upstairs room with a couch. Or one of the decks or the sunroom. At least Uncle Dave is tall enough to make some of the furniture look a little more reasonable.
Also interesting are the little tidbits you find on your search for the vegetable peeler or colander (or, let's be honest, when you're just snooping around trying to glean something personal about the owners amidst the impersonal decor and items left behind by other renters). My favorite discovery thus far in this house was actually a warning label posted on the screen in the bathroom. Why there would be one is beyond me, but being a compulsive reader of box labels, signs and just about anything printed, I leaned in for a closer look.So you don't have to get your glasses, I'll repeat the text here. "Insect screens are intended to provide reasonable insect control and are not intended to provide security or provide for the retention of objects or persons from the interior."

So . . . are we really this stupid now? Or this litigious? I'm going to sue the maker of the screen because while I was trying to lock my kid in the bathroom without having to use bug spray, he brokered an escape by lobbing the towel rack and then himself through the screen?

One other odd coincidence between this vacation and our earlier trip this summer is that we had power outages while staying in both homes. Not super unusual in Minneapolis, where 2 big afternoon thunder storms took down a lot of trees and power lines, but a little weird this afternoon here when there was a bit of wind but nothing much in the way of a storm. The only reason it was worth noting in this post is that in both places, without power, the house was rendered very un-functional for many things. Electric stoves meant no cooking. Food in the freezer and frig was at risk. Newer phones meant no calling because the base needs to be plugged in (at home we keep an old non-cordless phone around for power outages). In Minneapolis, our neighbors couldn't get in to their house because all they had was the garage door opener. We couldn't get out with the car (at least I wasn't willing to try to figure out the manual override for the garage door) and could have been stranded. My laptop has a good battery but without the modem, no wi-fi so no email or internet. Tonight we had cereal and salad for dinner since anything else would have needed some way of cooking to prepare it.

Last time and this both really made me think about how much we take for granted and depend on for basic needs. I wonder how much power this place sucks up just sitting here on the days and weeks no one has rented it. And I think again of my not-so-large home, and what else I might do to unplug a little more. We do choose to pay more for our electric to support Green Power (our extra money goes to alternative energy for the electric), but we still probably waste a lot. I'm not thinking I'll go off the grid, but maybe I could reduce my footprint a little bit more. Because frankly, I'm a bit afraid of going from fully powered to not prepared without a little something in between.