I don’t mind hot weather but sometimes I just want a break from it. Instead of closing all of the windows and cranking up the air conditioning I decided to outsource my cool air for today.
What am I talking about?
Instead of using the air conditioners at home and running up my electric bill just to cool off a single person I have moved my beloved laptop to a public location and effectively outsourced the cool air I desire.
Actually, I started off at McDonald’s, the closest place with free wifi, air conditioning and cheap breakfast!
As hot as it is I had no desire to heat my house up even more and I was really craving a sausage biscuit.
After breakfast I popped open my trusty Toshiba and started work, checking emails, confirming that all rewrites were completed and scanning over what articles I have placed in my queue, beginning one as I sat there enjoying the cool air.
After a while my battery ran low so I headed over to the library. Unfortunately I had forgotten that it was Sunday today—which meant that the library didn’t open until 1pm, which was an hour away.
I keep a battery backup in my van fortunately so I simply headed a few blocks over to the Riverfront, crawled in the back, hooked up the inverter and used the Paducah Hot Spot to complete my first article of the day before resuming my plan to cool off here at the McCracken County Library.
Not only am I able to outsource cool air by sitting here, I am also able relax in silence and enjoy the fact that I am working in a clean quiet space without so much as adding a penny to my electric bill. If I had thought about it I would have turned the router off at home to save a couple more pennies but such is life.
So now I sit at the library, connected to their electric grid happily typing away on my beloved laptop in the cool comfort of their reasonably-regulated air conditioning. The headphones I brought with me are playing classical piano thanks to Windows Media Internet Radio and I am not disturbing a single soul. Actually, I’m the only one in this section right now which is really nice.
When you have a laptop the possibilities simply open up before you. No longer are you stuck in your home to pound away at the keyboard, watch movies, listen to the radio or read books. You can literally take your world anywhere you desire to go.
Have you considered ways you can outsource things in your life? If you are single, instead of cooling a whole house or apartment for just you why not head to the library or some other cool place instead? Not only will you save money by not using electricity but you will help reduce the demand on the already-strained power grid and benefit the environment at least that little bit.
There is a book by Gregory Paul Johnson titled “Put Your Life on a Diet.”
This book is what really helped put a new face on the term “outsourcing” for me. If you get a chance, go to the searchable text he has available on Amazon and search for “outsourcing” to get an idea for what he has to say.He lives very simply, though not as simply as he used to in years past now. Here is another video by him:
Time for me to get back to work.