One more bill gone electronic

National Grid finally updated their billing system to allow for email billing instead of snail mail billing (although they haven’t advertised it as far as I see). Now the only paper statements/bills I get are those for my mortgage loans, where the bank says that they can’t make those electronic “due to compliance reasons”.

So, I’m one step closer to going mail-free.

Where my taxes went: 2007

This past weekend, I calculated and informed the state and federal government how much I was supposed to pay them in taxes in 2007, and scheduled the transfers to and from my bank account to settle up. I also constructed this graph, showing what portion of my total tax expenditure went for what. (Note that this only includes taxes based on assets and income, not taxes on expenditures, because I don’t track those as closely.)
Graph

Update on my new elected position

I called the Town Clerk’s office today, and apparently the Republican Town Committee is in fact a real entity, but they didn’t get their list of nominees for the positions to the state by the deadline, so that’s why all the positions on the ballot were blank. That is, all the positions were filled via write-ins, and I was one of the top 35 vote getters. The person I spoke with couldn’t tell me exactly how many votes I got since that information wasn’t readily available, but said that she would call me back tomorrow with that, and said that she knew that some people made it in with only 1 or 2 votes.

Apparently, the chairman of the committee is supposed to be receiving a list of people who were voted in, and will be contacting them at some point. So I should either wait to be contacted, or try to find contact information myself for the chairman (the Town Clerk’s office could give me the name but not much else).

Unexpected Letter

Letter received today from the Charlton Town Clerk’s office (with the official embossed seal and everything):

This is to certify that Peter Cooper Jr.
Was duly elected to the REPUBLICAN TOWN COMMITTEE
at the 2008 Presidential Primary held February 5, 2008 at the
Heritage School, 34 Oxford Road, Charlton.

Please appear at the Town Clerk’s Office to be sworn into office at your earliest convenience

Jessi wrote me in on one of the 35 blank lines for Town Committee, and apparently that was enough.

Now I just need to figure out what the Town Committee does, when they meet, and if there are any other members.

Unexpected elections on the ballot

This morning, I voted in the presidential primary. While generally there are a few more elections on a ballot than the ones you hear mostly about (since some positions have one or zero candidates), I didn’t realize that there would be some on this ballot. In addition to an uncontested race for a “man on state committee”, and a race with no candidates for a “woman on state committee”, which in retrospect shouldn’t be too surprising, there were thirty-five write-in spaces (and no listed candidates) for “town committee”. I’m now wishing I thought to write my own name in on one of the lines.

This quite possibly was the first primary election in which I took part. (In 2004, the Republican primary wasn’t very interesting. It’s also possible that the ballot was quite different because I was living in Worcester. In 2000, I was not yet 18.)