OMG 😍

Not to sound like a conception-happy Omega who just went off suppressants, but...

Heeeeeeeaaaaaat! 🔥🌡⬆

Cold Room Behavior

Over the period of time my parents and I spent without a working furnace, I noticed a few related changes in my own behavior, two subtle and one much less so.

Subtle change the first: I got hungry more often and so ate more. I expect this was because my metabolism was trying to keep up with the sudden influx of indoor cold. 50°F/10°C doesn't seem very cold, until your house doesn't really get warmer than that without a space heater.

Subtle change the second: I left the house less. Part of this was related to the accompanying snow, it's true, but also there was the subconscious knowledge that I would be going back to a house that it would be very difficult to warm back up in. Going out in the cold is a lot less attractive when you can't go someplace you know will warm you up when you're done.

Less subtle change: I've had problems keeping up with hygiene for most of my life, and only successfully managed to switch to basically-daily showers (from every other day or so) in 2020, as a response to Covid. I still miss a day or two here and there, or take especially brief showers where I only soap up the extra stinky places and keep my hair covered, but I'm pretty lucky in that my body odor isn't particularly pervasive.

For the time we've been furnace-less, I managed only an abbreviated shower, and that only once; going from a chilly bedroom to a chilly bathroom to face the prospect of leaving a hot shower to go back to the rest of a chilly bathroom and eventually a chilly bedroom was not attractive to me in the slightest. Even less so was the notion of doing it with wet hair. And since I'm a night bather and don't have my own blow-drier, tonight was the first time I washed my hair since Sunday night. I had plans to borrow mom's blow-drier if our new furnace hadn't been installed today, because enough was enough, but I am very glad I didn't have to in the end.

Overall, I am very, very glad to have a nice, warm house again.