Oh, joy, a repeat of what we had two weeks ago, only this time, not as cold, but longer in duration (all week). Still, facing plunging temperatures in the next few days is going to make things very unpleasant as far as trying to get out is concerned. My car is due for some maintenance work on Tuesday morning, meaning that I have to drop it off on Monday night and walk home in plunging temperatures, and then walk places that I have to be on Tuesday while I wait for the car to be repaired. Not sure that I will get out at all on Tuesday if it's too cold, but as long as the car is ready by the time I need to attend choir rehearsal on Tuesday night, I'll be fine. Naturally, all this extreme cold serves to do is to give the climate change deniers the ammunition they need to say, see, how can you say that we're experiencing global warming when it's so darned cold? Well, they do not understand how climate science works, so let them sit and spin and keep denying that our climate is changing for the worse. In the meantime, I'll be greatly relieved when winter is over and warmer temperatures come our way. The trouble with that is that I will have to get screens made for all of my windows since none of them has any, and all I had last summer were those little half screen things that you can buy at hardware stores. The problem with those is that they leave big enough gaps between the bottom of the window sash and the top of the screen to allow tons of insects to get through.
Last summer, I had regular nightly invasions of tons and tons of insects in the house that got through those gaps. They holed up in the house as the cold weather approached and now they're inside the house trying tos stay warm over the winter months. I've already removed hundreds of them since the weather got colder and I am bone weary of living in an insect infested house. I just don't want to fill up the place with toxic insecticide bug bombing and have the residue of that stuff all over my things. So I guess I must make peace with living in a veritable jungle or find some kind of safe, non-toxic and natural insect removal tool. At least I am mostly warm enough in this big old drafty barn of a house, and I have plenty of warm clothes and blankets to curl up in if I get cold from drafts coming in through the large gaps in the warped window sashes. I wish that my landlord would invest some money in the house and replace the shot roof and the leaky windows, but I know that's but a pipe dream and will not happen, so......I have to reconcile myself to living in a house that could benefit from a healthy investment of about $30,000 to bring it up to modern energy efficiency standards (including Energy Star efficient refrigerators, again, not going to happen, sadly, even though I am sure that tax breaks could be had by making the place more energy efficient). Replacement windows would not only solve the ongoing insect invasion problems, but would keep us from having to constantly switch between screen windows and storm windows every six months. Putting them in and taking them out of windows that can't stay open without being propped up by whatever means necessary (usually, found items like old table legs, sticks, whatever can be found to do the job) is a royal pain in the rear. Not having to do that, not having to have storm and screen windows custom made to fit windows and pay someone to come in and install them every six months, would save my landlord a bundle, because as warped and drafty as the windows are here, we have to keep the gas up pretty high just to stay warm, and he pays the heat bills. I hate to think what they are going to be this month with one polar vortex having come and gone and another one about to descend upon us in about 36 hours from now. My guess is that the heat bill for January is going to be brutal. I would not be surprised if it was somewhere between $500-$1000 to heat this big old three story house. All I can say is, boy, am I glad we do not pay for heat here! Electricity was bad enough last month (probably from all of the Christmas lights my neighbor and I had on our trees and on the front porch). The water bill was also bad because the drug store where I pay my bill lost last month's check and I had to pay two months worth as a result. I'm doing everything that I can to keep next month's utility bills under control. We'll see if that works. In the meantime, we'll do what we can to stay warm in this drafty old house as another arctic wave descends upon us in the next day or two.
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