Tag Archives: Atlanta

The Next Steps

Posted on by
Reply

So now that we’ve returned home, some of you may be asking what we are going to do now.

Well, Asa has made his way to Atlanta to play ultimate frisbee for the club season with his old team, Chain Lightning. Having been a part of this team for the last 4 years, and the two of us not having any grand plans arranged, it was a must for Asa to play another season. He is still in the same wonderful job that he can do from anywhere! He will be doing a lot of traveling for the frisbee season, making appearances in Santa Cruz, Washington D.C., Orlando, and hopefully Sarasota at the end of October.

I am currently in California with my parents and our pets.

The view from my parents’ balcony. It sure is a tough life!

One of my goals during our stay in Uruguay was to find a job for when we got back. Yeah, that didn’t happen, but not for lack of trying. Apparently the academic and science fields are super hard to find a job in right now. So, that’s one of my main activities now: job searching. I am also hard at work continuing to publish work from my PhD dissertation. While in Uruguay I got two papers published and have a book chapter and another paper in the works. For the first time in a long time (almost 10 years), my athletic ambitions do not involve frisbee. Instead I am going to have some fun running and get back into triathlons with my dad.

The next question you’re probably thinking about is what is going to happen with the blog. Well, at least for a while, we’ll continue to post thoughts and reflections from our trip to Uruguay. We learned a lot that we definitely want to share.

We will also start posting some of our adventures in the states. Our friends in Uruguay can get an idea of our life in the states and our friends closer to home may get some awesome ideas for places to go or things to see.

Advertisement

Surprise Electricity Bill

Posted on by
2

Electricity is an expensive component of Uruguayan living expenses. The main reason being that a large percentage of electricity in Uruguay is imported from Argentina and Brazil. As with everything else that is imported, it’s expensive. Most of the electricity generated within the country comes from hydroelectric sources, and the electrical industry in Uruguay is controlled solely by the national company, UTE. As always wikipedia has an interesting article about the production and use of electricity in Uruguay if you’re interested.

When we got our electricity bill this month we were a little surprised. We have been paying on average about $50 US a month for our electricity. The electricity bill the month before last popped up to about $100 US. We figured it was because it started to get cold and we started to use the heater a bit more. Well, the bill this month came to a whopping $243 US. I guess that’s the price for having the heater on all the time.

Out of curiosity, we calculated what the same usage would cost us in our previous residence in Atlanta, GA. The answer: about $100 US. This matches closely to the amount we paid for electricity in the winter months in Atlanta in a 3 bedroom house. This means two things: 1) that the heating system here is super inefficient and 2) electricity costs more than twice as much in Uruguay than Atlanta.

I’d like to say that we could just turn the heater off to save money, but I work from the house. If it’s too cold I can’t get much done because I’m completely uncomfortable. I guess if I was working in an office space the money we are spending on electricity would just go toward transportation and office space instead, and we wouldn’t really be saving money.