The Blizzard Within

Newsletter 2025-01-17

The winters here are getting harder. Scratch that. The winters are the same as ever. I’m getting softer. It’s negative three degrees outside, but inside, the thermostat says it’s still seventy. That’s a lie. I’m wearing three layers and wrapped in a blanket. Yet at the same temperature in May, I’d be walking around in shorts and a t-shirt. There’s a difference between a warm seventy and a cold seventy. This is an Arctic seventy. I’m having trouble making it through the winter in a temperature controlled house. I have no idea how my primitive ancestors survived this outside. I couldn’t handle hunting and foraging in the middle of an ice age; I can barely manage working at a computer in my insulated house. Then again, my house isn’t really insulated. Perhaps I would have been better off in a prehistoric cave after all.

My house was built at a time when the idea of keeping warm was solely aspirational. It has walls, but the wind doesn’t know that. It cuts right through whenever it pleases. I drink a lot of diet soda. So much so, in fact, that I’ve stopped putting it in the fridge. It doesn’t hit my tongue for long enough for me to tell if it’s warm or cold. I only sense the temperature afterwards when the two liters of Diet Mountain Lightning I just inhaled replace the contents of my circulatory system. My quality of life is better if my new green blood starts out at room temperature. Instead of carrying the sixteen bottles I buy on every shopping trip all the way to the spare fridge at the back of the house, I set them on the floor in neat lines near the front door. Yesterday, I opened a floor bottle and it was as cold as if I’d taken it directly out of the fridge. It’s possible that the inside of the actual fridge is now the warmest part of this house. The thermostat in the dining room can claim whatever it wants, but my chilly Diet Mountain Lightning doesn’t lie. I’m living in an indoor tundra.

The kids don’t believe the thermostat, either. Their doubts are justified. They spend most of their time on the second floor, where heat is distributed extremely unequally. Betsy and Mae have an unobstructed vent in the wall of their room. It stays reasonably warm as long as they keep their door closed. If they leave it open, that warm air escapes into the rest of the house. That would be tragic. Sharing warmth is a form of communism. The big girls also have loft beds, which keep them even warmer. Hot air rises. Being squeezed closer to our tall ceilings gets them an extra degree or two. That’s totally worth the occasional concussion when they forget where they are and sit up too much. If the girls were more concerned with comfort, they’d spend the whole winter warped in blanket cocoons high above the floor. It’s hard to make trouble from there, though, so of course they venture out. Their younger sisters won’t antagonize themselves.

Lucy and Waffle have enough other enemies to deal with.