Baby it's cold... inside

Last night the temperature dropped to something like 15 below zero, with a bit of a wind. It was cold, inside and out. This morning the actual temp registering on the thermostat in the dining room was 62. Yikes! The thermostat was set to 70! My immediate fear was that the furnace had gone off, but no, it was cranking away. And all the radiators were warm (except the one in Amber's room, which doesn't work very well). The heat was just leaking out of the house faster than the radiators could warm it up.

Now, -15F is cold, but nothing close to the record cold for this date (-36!!) or even the coldest it's been since we've lived in this house. We've got some serious heat leaks somewhere. Of course, it didn't help that someone had draped towels and stuff all over the main radiator in the living room. I cleared the radiators off and turned on the ceiling fan to distribute the heat a little better, and the temperature went up a couple of degrees within the hour. We also discovered a hell of a cold draft coming in the landing window, which still has the air conditioner in it (covered with plastic for winter, but the technique was less than perfect). I stuffed an old towel into the gaping crack at the TOP of the lower casement, and the cold draft by that window diminished significantly. The inside temperature eventually made it all the way to 70 (at least at the thermostat, which is situated at the warmest possible spot in the house). We'll see how we do tonight, which is supposed to be even colder.

Saturday So Far

Got up at 8, made myself buckwheat pancakes on the fine griddle on the new stove, warmed up the car for a surprisingly insufficient 10 minutes, and scooted off to ice skating class. I wasn't feeling too competent during the class itself - stiffness in the hips from some exercises yesterday encumbered me a bit. There's a place to practice after class which I usually take advantage of for about half an hour. After 20 minutes or so I finally started to loosen up enough to feel comfortable skating backwards, which felt so good that I kept going for an extra 15 minutes. That's a total of 1 hour 15 minutes of skating, the longest I've ever skated at once.

I've spent the rest of the day working towards installing the ass-kicking new 7.1 channel computer speaker set I bought from a work colleage on Friday. I haven't actually plugged it in yet - I've been cleaning the office to make room for the massive subwoofer.

Now I have to stop and get ready for the Office Christmas Party. I'm not really excited about this, but it's always a good idea to attend events that your employer has spent a lot of money on. If nothing else, it's a free meal. This one could be more fun than the usual office holiday party because of the gaming theme. They're setting up some kind of portable casino in one of the function rooms at the Sofitel, and issuing play money and raffle tickets. This is the only way you can get engineers to gamble, of course. We're way too rational to throw away our OWN money on games that we are mathematically certain to lose at.