Blog Number 442

Greetings and welcome to today's random thought.

Yesterday we had to break down and turn on the furnace for the first time this season.  We had avoided it thus far despite some nights dipping into the lower 50's.  Our house keeps pretty warm but yesterday was just too cold.  This means of course that the "thermostat wars" will soon begin again.  The wife (being part reptile) cannot generate her own heat and (short of having a heat rock handy) needs to have it a few degrees warmer in the house then I care to pay for all winter.  We will agree to a daytime temperature and a nighttime temperature but when I leave the house and am not here to see the thermostat, all agreements are considered null and void where a flimsy excuse like, "It felt colder than X° in here" is all that is needed to justify violating the terms of our thermostat war treaty.

We took a few years off of the winter version of this war while in Texas (winter is only 2 weeks long there it seemed).  The main warring moved to the summertime and regulating the central air.  On the hottest months I calculated that every day cost $3 to cool the house.  So anyday that we succeeded in leaving the air turned off was a day to celebrate the savings.  I could predict my electric bill pretty accurately based on the number of days in the billing period that the air was used.  Here in Indiana we seldom had to use the AC this summer as it was quite mild.

Wednesday nights the kids have AWANA at church and the wife is one of the leaders so I have the option of staying home, going to AWANA and helping or finding something else to do (like visit with my gramndmother).  I stayed home 2 weeks ago (the day I shaved off my hair) and last week I went to the church so tonight I decided to visit my grandmother.  She recently moved into my mom's condo while my mom bought the condo next door and moved into it.  The condos are actually duplexs but my mother's house and my grandmother's house are not connected and are actually mirror images of each other.  This makes it feel very strange now to go to my mother's house and have everything be completely backwards of what I am used to.  Anyway, tonight I was at grandma's house (my mom's old house) so everything was in the right place.  That is except the thermostat.  My grandmother (who is also part reptile in her old age) has the heat set pretty high.  On top of that, she sits with a space heater about 1 foot from her body most times.  I stayed about 90 minutes and showed her some videos I took of the kids during their recent recitals.  She was impressed of course.  I was sitting next to her and showing her the videos on my laptop.  This meant that I was pretty close to the space heater as well so fortunately for me the videos were only about a minute each so I could head back to the relative coolness of the couch.

Well I have the thermostat set to 66° right now so it is time to head back and get under the covers and pray the same prayer I pray most winters, namely that the wife's feet aren't too cold (please Lord!  Amen!)

Thanks for reading my Random Thoughts.

Jon