Saturday, October 22, 2005

The heat is on

We gave in last weekend and turned the heat on. My mom was here for the weekend. She's perpetually chilly, and we figured it was easier to just turn the furnace on than to make her uncomfortable for the whole weekend. After she left, we said, we'll turn it off again for a couple weeks.

Yeah, right.

It is not even Halloween and already I have had to defrost my windshield and dig out my scarf and gloves. So the heat is on, and it's staying on. We're going with the cost-savings strategy we used last year: The digital thermostat is set on 65 for the times when we're home. If we want to bump it up to 68, we can, but otherwise the default is 65. (Previously, it'd been on 68 when we were home, which meant that making it significantly warmer in the house required turning it up to 70.) I think I turned the nighttime temp down to 58 or something, too. We've got a price cap on our oil -- something ridiculous like $2.69 a gallon -- but it still behooves us to be as conservative with it as possible.

The only problem is that a few key rooms in our house don't have heating registers. Rooms like our bedroom, and the office where my computer sits. (Perhaps that's the reason for slow blogging of late.) If the Big Plan actually happens, I'm going to have to figure out some heating solution for the office -- an electric space heater, maybe?

And speaking of the Big Plan, I've got a meeting this week with the editor of a magazine for which I write frequently, who's interested in brainstorming with me about potential ways in which I might contribute more to the publication. Should be interesting.

(Apologies, by the way, to anyone who now has that terrible Glenn Frey song in his/her head... it was totally unintentional, but now I am suffering, too, believe me.)