I can’t get warm.
“I’m cold,” I said last night at the dinner table. Kris and I were eating take out pizza: mine pepperoni and pineapple, hers barbecue chicken and skanky black olives. (Why can’t pizza places buy good black olives?)
“This house is going to get cold this winter,” Kris said, munching on a slice.
“You think?” I asked.
“Yes, I do,” she said.
She may be right.
We recently had a high-efficiency gas furnace installed. It takes a while for it to do its thing, but once the house is warm, it seems to maintain the temperature fairly well. Still, we have to figure out how to program the thermostat so the house is warm when we need it to be warm, but is cool when we need it to be cool.
This morning was bad.
Last night Kris decided to fiddle with the thermostat. She delayed the morning heat by half an hour. It’s not tremendously cold outside yet — no lower than the mid-40s — but when I got up this morning it felt colder than it has been so far this fall. I was decidedly cool. In the old house I would have warmed my inner core with a nice bath. That’s no longer possible, of course, and a shower just doesn’t provide the same warmth.
Nevertheless, I had it in my mind that a hot shower would be just the thing. Only a hot shower was not to be had. There was no hot water. Kris had used it all. So, not only was my inner core not warmed, it was actually cooled.
I reacted by sulking and pouting, of course.
“Stop it,” Kris said. “It’s not worth being grouchy.”
“You’re not the one who’s cold,” I said. “You had a hot shower.”
She just shook her head and ignored me. I went upstairs to the computer. There I performed an iTunes filter on the word “cold”. I played the resulting songlist.
“Very funny,” said Kris over Foreigner’s “Cold as Ice”. When I left the house, Hank Williams’ “Cold Cold Heart” was playing.
On the drive to work, I cranked the heat as I listened to my Patrick O’Brian. I’m sure the car was an inferno by the time I reached work, but I still felt cold.
At work, in my skunky office, I turned on the space heater full blast. I zipped my sweatshirt. I tried to think warm thoughts. I listened to the Beach Boys.
José came in for some orders. “Ay-yi,” he said. “Es muy caliente!”
I still think it’s cold.
I can’t get warm.
We’re having temperature issues here in our new laboratory, as well. The chemistry rooms have been warm. Even for me, 84 degrees when I’m wearing a fall sweater and lab coat is too hot. Today we learned the reason: the thermostatic sensor that controls the chemistry lab, instrument room and offices is (wisely) located in the trace evidence microscope room, located on an outer wall right by a large window. As a result, the thermostat thinks it’s cold, and heat is pumped out in chemistry. The heat never reaches the sensor, of course, because the heat and the sensor are separated by two air-seal doors. Lovely.
This morning, we are finally getting our bulletin boards mounted on the walls. Why, you may ask, did it take three weeks? Because, dear reader, we were not allowed to hang them ourselves. No, sir! Instead, a state (DAS)employee had to do the job. Now, there are state employees and there are state employees. Our particular DAS representative is about 6-foot-two and hugely obese. He moves in slow motion, taking frequent rests. As you can imagine, in the heat, he was sweating profusely, using his already-sodden bandana to wipe the sweat from his bald head.
As the DAS guy was laboring with drill and screws, my co-worker Rob had put in a CD mix of mine that ended with Coolio’s “Gangsta’s Paradise”. This engendered a discussion of the Weird Al version, “Amish Paradise”. So, the next CD had to be Weird Al’s Greatest Hits. Too late did we guiltily realize that the first two songs are “Fat” and “Eat it”. Boy, did we feel like jerks.