I woke up this morning feeling warm and comfortable after staying up until 4am editing the last of my work from November’s “Blog of Tomorrow.”
Not like sweaty and sick warm. More like waking up with the sun beating down on you through a window warm. Except, our bedroom windows are blanketed in blackout curtains. It wasn’t the sun.
Maybe the warmth and comfort was the feeling of a job well done?
No, E informed me, it was actually the feeling of our boiler completely ceasing its communication with our thermostat overnight and deciding to heat the inside of the house to 78° Fahrenheit. It just so happens that my side of the bed is an arm’s reach away from the radiator, so I was probably considerably warmer than 78° by the time I awoke.
(For reference, with the heat off for over 12hrs right now it is a comfortably cool 66° inside while it’s more like 40° outside.)
I was alarmed by this information, but not surprised. I am not a science denier, but as far as I am concerned the thermostat is a work of sorcery. I don’t understand how a little box with mercury in it on the dining room wall (which we replaced with a digital touch screen version) could possible dictate the actions of the boiler in the basement. The internet tells me such a thing was possible as far back as the 18th century.
In response, I will again refer you to: work of sorcery.
After some tinkering and turning the boiler on and off we determined that the problem was somewhere between it and the thermostat. E had to leave for work and, as we’ve established, I am not the handy person in this relationship, so our agreed-upon strategy to avoid manually turning the boiler on and off all day was that I would let the heat pump up to a slightly too-warm level and then coast on that through the evening.
Of course, a house-wide “too warm” equates to “nearing spontaneous combustion” when standing next to a radiator working overtime.
As a result of this plan, at one point earlier today I found myself sitting in our front hall (which contains a radiator) in a t-shirt and pajama bottoms staring out of our open door while EV drew on our walk with chalk just eight feet away, bundled up for Autumn.
It only lasted for a few minutes, but it was one of those memories. There was just something about the picture compared with the inherent comedy of our heating situation.
(We also watched the second half of The Wiz today, which made EV cry and make the saddest face I’ve ever seen on a human being. More on that later, maybe.)
I swear, I did not sabotage our thermostat purely to create this analogy, but today on CK feels a lot like our front hall. On one side I have a month so full of content that it would constitute a quarter or a year depending on you measure, and on the other side I have a vast expanse of open air.
I’m going to take a couple of days to relax and begin to cook up what comes next for CK. Rest assured, you’re safe from multiple posts a day for the time being. I’ll also be reshuffling some of the daily themes (e.g., no live streams this month, while I get some gear repaired), but before I do that I’ll be back tomorrow to finish up Issue #1 of my novel, Krisis.