Reading: The Outlaws of Sherwood and The Home Orchardist

Moving: walked 2.7 miles

Watching: Olympics, natch

Learning: The sun rotates every 27 days. Who knew?

21 September 2000: Autumn

Yowza, it's fall. As if I hadn't been able to tell as the sun's been rousing itself later and later. It is now thoroughly dark at six when I'm supposed to be getting up, and this makes me grumpy. It's only going to get worse for another five or more weeks, but even reverting to Right and Proper Time won't make the sun rise before six. Some crackpot had some theory or other about blasting the moon out of the sky since a nice flat sea would make for better shipping, or something, and all the critters and flora that depend on tides could go hang. I say this person was a crackpot, but how would sunrise at six sharp every day be? A nice round orbit should do it.

So yesterday was freezing. Relatively speaking. Nineties on Sunday, freakishly high; eighties on Monday, very pleasant; fifties yesterday after a rainy night. I think we should hibernate in the basement, which is so much warmer. This after a summer spent--vernerating?--in the basement, which was always cooler. This is also the first time I have had to pay for my own heat.

I grew up in a house with electric heat. I eventually realized this is why my father resents nuclear energy: not for danger, current or future, and not even for the fact that the Millstone plants were non-union (though he'd point out that the Haddam Neck plant operated more and better, because (he believes) of its unionized workforce), but because when my parents built their house in 1966-67, the hype was that nuclear power would make electricity so cheap it wouldn't even have to be metered. So they installed electric heat, as had a lot of the houses built about the same time in that area. I think.

I went to school in the same Yankee (read frugal) town. Tights were de rigeur when I was a child, and how I hated them! Perhaps because I wore them with skirts, which I also hated. Such a hoyden. So I preferred pants. Also I hated turtlenecks because they were so restrictive. By the time I got to high school, I could choose my own sizes if not my own styles, and I opt larger than the restrictively tight turtlenecks in which my mother (who favored the torpedo bras and fitted clothing of her youth) had earlier outfitted me. Cotton turtlenecks, wool sweaters, and either corduroy trousers (on days I worked at the library) or jeans (on days I did not): my winter wardrobe.

Then I went to college and learned about institutional heat. You were never cold at UConn, unless you were outside. You were warm (in the winter) or hot (in the summer). I couldn't control the heat in my freshling year dorm, and because RMD smoked (though both of us had marked "non-smoker" on the forms, I because I don't like tobacco smoke and she because she didn't want to live with another smoker), we kept the window open. In the sophomore year dorm, the radiator in my room had a thermostat, hooray! and I set it in the low 60s until I was yelled at by the hall coordinator (up the ladder from a simple RA) because that thermostat controlled the temperature of the entire floor, whose tenants wanted to bask in the mid 70s. My last five semesters I lived in my beloved Holcomb with its clangingly loud steam heat and individual room controls. I regularly kept mine off entirely since the surrounding rooms emanated plenty of heat.

I was always overwarm in the winter, in classrooms and the library as well as my own room, and I was getting used to it. Christmas breaks in my parents' house now felt cold to me. Then I lived with NMB, in the basement of a middle unit of connected townhouses, and that was plenty warm. Then I lived with LEB, or at least paid her rent. The basement, where my room was, was heated through its ceiling, which meant the floor, where I generally keep my feet, was always cold. I was actually living mostly with RDC in his grad dorm room, which again, was heated plenty. And then we lived in the tenement, with its heat rising up through its linoleum'd floor, and then in Denver, with its heat steaming out of registers, in attached apartments with paid heat.

So I'm used to winters at over 70 degrees. Except now I live in a detached house with heat I pay for and control.

Yesterday was cloudy, so the solar panels didn't do much good. Just as the house was difficult to cool in the summer, however, it should be easy to warm in the winter. Bricks retain heat. The weather'll warm back up, surely, for a while before real cold sets in for the season, and we'll get fewer drafts after I extricate the storm windows from the scary loft in the garage, and when it's sunny the solar panels should take care of the heat during the day--though they won't heat the exterior bricks, which was the kicker this summer.

Blake has been a convenient excuse to keep our dwellings comfortably warm. Now, though, I will yammer about natural resources and fossil fuel and tell the bird to tuck a foot into his belly fluff, when what I really mean is that I have to pay for it.

Tuesday morning I never opened the dining room windows that Blake's cage sits in front of, and Tuesday night I didn't leave the front and back doors open with a screened security door until I went to bed, as I have been doing. Yesterday we closed all the windows. All of them. The kitchen, bathroom, study, and bedroom windows have not been closed in four months, except when we went on vacation. Except one bedroom window that we cracked when we went to bed, snuggling under the down duvet that was too warm even for a solitary sleeper just last week.

Last night I wore cotton trousers and my UConn sweatshirt and socks, of all things. It's September. I hope to hold off on the fleece pants and wool socks for another couple of months, at least.

Winter. Exercise will keep us warm, should we ever bother to continue painting. And even if we paint, furniture will take a while. All the more excuse to cuddle on our mushroom furniture downstairs. Another reason: BBC America. Last night we watched an episode of Blackadder III (my least favorite of the four), "Ink and Incapability." Just a wee bit of anachronicity, having Samuel Johnson seek the future George IV's patronage, but this is Blackadder, and all is forgiven. I don't remember how the line was set up, but somehow Blackadder got to say something about Nelson's message in Egypt, "Lady Hamilton is a virgin; poke out my eye and cut off my arm if it isn't true." I cracked up. I had to explain it to RDC, whose knowledge of British history is rather more limited than mine, but at the end I did confess that I could find that line funny only because of Vivian Leigh. I'm so ashamed.

Despite its being so cold and dark this morning, I did manage to walk to work. I reset the alarm from 6:00 to 6:25, since Blake could stay in bed and I don't really need to read over a 25' breakfast. Up, dress, cereal, brush, comb, find light fleece jacket, pack clothing and book, kiss, leave. Wearing socks with my Tevas. About a third of the way to work I removed the socks, and it's going to be in the 70s today.

As the sun begins to rise too much after 7:00 for it to be safe for me to walk to work, I can bike (since it's faster and thus I can leave later and lighter), but I'd better walk while I can and finish Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. I'm on the second side of tape 8, at a rate of a little less than a side per walk. Seven more sides to go, so I should be done before I go to TJZ's wedding. I hope.