Cold

We're finally heading into some cold weather -- Monday and Tuesday are predicted not to get above freezing, although it will apparently be only a brief shot of frigidity. I've pretty much forgotten what it's like, having to get up in the middle of the night to stoke the stove and make sure it's going before I leave for work. Then when I get home at night the fire has burned out and the house is chilly. It takes a half hour or so for the stove to really get working.

Normal people nowadays keep their houses at 72 degrees even when nobody is there. Even the very progressive folks who turn the thermostat down when they aren't around don't turn it down very much because they can't stand to wait for the house to get warm again. If you think about it, that seems awfully wasteful. After all, we can stand to be outside with our coats on, so we can probably stand to be in a 55 degree house for 30 minutes. Before the days of central heating, the bedrooms were quite chilly and the temperature in the house would go up and down depending on when the fire got stoked. The Indians only had one room but I imagine it was pretty chilly in winter pretty much all the time. People lived that way here for thousands of years. Maybe we should be a little more tolerant of the cold.