water water everywhere

I walked to my parents' this evening and asked Mom, "So, if you get a notice from the water company on your front door, can you pay that online or should you go to the office to guarantee you'll have water on Thanksgiving? You know, just hypothetically." I'm not sure how it happened but I managed to miss paying any water bills since August. Whoops. I knew there was a bill I had way overpaid on and I thought it was the water bill, but it was actually the gas bill. Thankfully, the water company office is on the way to work, so the dog and I will stop by and pay that at 8am. I don't need to risk them turning it off tomorrow afternoon. I would hope they aren't cold-hearted like that, but I'm not going to bet on it. Maybe I should just make all the bills auto-pay themselves.

The water notice was a good kick in the ass for me to sit down and reconcile the bank account for the month. I had been slacking on that and wasn't looking forward to the tedium. But I'm happy to say my bank account online reconciles to my Money account on the computer to the penny.

While sorting those expenses, I discovered that DirecTV had overcharged me by $767.80. They offered to give me a credit for those items on our DirecTV bill, but at that rate I would have pre-paid our account until 2009. I managed to get most of it refunded directly and the rest as a credit, but I'm going to have to check up on them in 7-10 days and make sure it worked.

Ironically, DirecTV is one of the few bills that auto debits from my checking account, so maybe I should rethink that whole auto-pay solution.