Booyah!

Most of the country is currently in a big natural walk-in freezer, and in many places the temperature is lower than in Denver where I live. As I write this, it is 10:30 in the morning and the outside temperature is -3 degrees without the wind chill. Mind you, no one has to tell me "Yeah but it's (-10 or -20 or -30) here where I live!" because I know, I get that. I am relating MY reality, that is all.

In my apartment complex, the heat system is a radiant system that gets turned on for the complex in October and turned off in May. I have a 500-square foot apartment so there is not a whole lot of space that requires heating. Mine was stuck on the entire eight months. No matter how I tried to work the thermostat, it was full blast. I tried turning it off, but the pipes were still too-hot-to-touch and heat continued to puff out anyway. Winters in Denver get chilly but in the last three years, were generally tolerable and seldom got in the single digits. I spent the winter months in the same type of shorts-and-tee shirts I wore in July. There were some days in May and in early October that were miserable, hotter inside my apartment than outside. There is no air conditioning in Chez Jones, only fans that I must supply myself.

When I finally fixed my overheating problem last fall by discovering and replacing the dead batteries in the thermostat, I have lived in more realistic temperatures ever since. Denver is located on the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains and is surprisingly quite comfortable most of the time. Snowstorms tend to come off the mountains, hop over Denver and land in the plains east of the city. Thunderstorms and rainstorms seem to skirt the Denver area as well, so I became rather spoiled by comfortable atmospherics of north-of-central Colorado.

However, the current intense cold is threatening to overrule the heating simply because it is SO FREAKIN' COLD. It is not the apartment heating system's fault, it is simply that cold. I kept the faucets dripping and the cabinets open, et cetera as I should. Last night the temps dropped to -7, and it was a wrench crawling out from under the electric blanket and toppers on my bed.

I had set my thermostat on 86 to counteract the cold, so when I saw the 59 degrees reading on the thermostat this morning I was not surprised, in fact it was better than I thought. I wanted to bring up the temperature inside a little more because my bones are aching like nobody's business. I fired up a ceramic space heater in the living room and that was a good start.

I checked the pantry to plan today's dinner and realized the spaghetti squash I bought some time ago is still waiting for action. YEEHAW! I turned on the oven to 400 degrees, prepped the squash and in doing so, brought the apartment temperature up to 61 degrees. It astonished me that only two degrees turns me from shivering a little, to being comfy in layered clothes.

Now the oven is off, and the spaghetti is cooked so that particular heat source is not going any longer - and that is fine. It took the main chill out of the air and the little ceramic heater is keeping things pretty steady. I theoretically appreciate ready-to-eat Ragu sauce but nuh uh, spaghetti sauce in my place has to be homemade so that will come next.

I plan to wrap up with lap robes and a heating pad and spend the majority of the day writing, with a break for lunch and then for dinner. Since I can no longer imbibe alcohol, I will content myself with hot tea and hot apple cider. As the Marines say, "Improvise, Adapt, Overcome."

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