In my room there are two heating vents and two windows. However, the primary heating vent and the draftiest window happen to occupy the same cubic meter of space, which has today left me with an interesting dilemma.
I can, and do, typically place a homo-sapien-sized pile of laundry in front of said window to absorb the intermittent chilling wind (yes, wind) that it produces. That same pile of laundry is also, unavoidably, sitting directly in front of the more functional of my two heating vents. I am wagering that eliminating both sources of temperature change keeps my room at a higher constant temperature than allowing them to cancel each other out. This morning i was beginning to fear not that i was wrong… not that the man-made hot air could overcome natures brutal breeze. No. That would be too easy.
Now i see that my trivial placement of soiled clothing can not protect me from the unending onslaught of cold that is this winter. If this makes any sense at all, my room is so cold right now that i think reverse evaporation is occurring… which, yes, i know is technically sortof condensation, but this is a lot more like water molecules diving out of the air and into my cappuccino mug because they too are freezing their asses off in here. There is literally an inch more liquid in the mug then there was when i went to sleep, and my previously dried tea-bag has generated its own puddle. Or, as i like to refer to it, refugee camp for displaced molecular structures.
In a similar vein, last night when most normal people went to sleep it was twenty, yes, twenty degrees warmer outside than it is right now. Earlier yesterday i was complaining that i skipped an entire week of going to work in favor of working on Vagina Monologues, but now i am starting to think that was just an excuse to be somewhere other than here — or the two mile stretch of outside that lies between here and any other place where i can get anything done. Because, well, since i don’t particularly fancy the stretch right now, here is the only place i plan to be going.
[…] That thought sustained my negligence of our heater through the evening, but it hasn’t carried me through to fitful sleep. Our bedroom, an addition to the house, hangs precipitously over our back door, my side of the bed exposed to the bitter elements on five sides. Even at my most endurant iron-man moment my resolve to avoid using our heat evaporates upon entry into the bedroom – especially without Elise and her heating pad to huddle up against to osmose some warmth. […]