Minnesota Should Renounce Me For Being Cold ~ Blog 43

The most amazing heating devices known to man.

A year ago, my feet were really cold. There were two factors at play. For starters, it's fairly obvious that I am afflicted with Raynaud's phenomenon. If you don't want to click the link, the short version is that my fingers and toes go white numb at the slightest hint of cold. It's at least partly psychological, as 66 degrees in summer is fine but if I'm in a 66-degree room in winter, body parts go numb. Gloves and thick ski socks don't really help. It sucks and it partly explains why I must never live in Duluth, Minnesota, ever again.

It helps my extremities stay warm if we can set the heat in our apartment or home to at least 68 degrees. That was a problem a year ago. We were in a three-story home in Portland, Maine. Our home had a heating-oil system, as many homes in northern New England do, and heating oil isn't cheap. Take the price of gasoline, subtract 20 cents, and that's about the price of heating oil. Last winter, it was around $3.75 a gallon.

The Wife was in PA school a year ago, which means she wasn't making any money. I was unemployed, collecting federal benefits to the tune of about a thousand bucks a month. Contrary to what you've heard, living off student loans and federal money is not a lavish lifestyle. We qualified for food stamps. We could have gotten heating oil assistance programs. I wasn't OK with that.

Setting the thermostat at 60 degrees, on the other hand, I was OK with. The heat popped all the way up to 64 first thing in the morning, to make waking up a little more tolerable. Then, wrapped in a sweatshirt and blankets, I'd spend the day on the couch, applying for work.

We burned through about 500 gallons of heating oil last winter. A rough guess would put our cost at about $2,000 for the winter. At 60 degrees.

My feet are cold as I type this, but only because I went to the basement of our place in Boston to rearrange and organize the space. These are the things you do when you live in a small condo in the big city. The condo is a balmy 70 degrees, so those toes should warm quickly. There's a chocolate lab wrapped around my right arm, her snout almost on top of my right wrist, hindering my ability to hit the 'Y' key on the keyboard. I'm plenty warm.

Our rent includes the price of heat and hot water. The condo is heated by a little Rennai heater, which runs on natural gas. It's about 2 feet to my left. It pops on briefly and blows out rather hot air. This little unit, with no duct work in the condo, heats the entire 530 square feet rather nicely.

TW is out at work, making money to pay back those student loan debts and put food on the table. I have a part-time job, making about enough each month to pay the rent.

It isn't glamorous nor are either of us doing exactly what we want to be doing. We want more for ourselves, though not financially. We want careers that we're satisfied with, and there are signs that we might both make some steps in that direction in the next year.

A year is a long time. Three years ago, we were in a tiny apartment in Salt Lake City, living well below our means. We were preparing to quit our jobs so TW could go to PA school. We knew there was a rough road ahead, but we told ourselves, "We can do anything for two years."

I won't begin to comment on the naivety. Two years is a very, very long time to have cold fingers and feet.

A new year is a time to reflect on how far you've come. There's a saying that goes, "Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans." That's true for a lot of people. For us, life is turning out more or less the way we planned. That's gratifying, to be sure, but it's also exciting because we have big plans ahead. There will be curve balls. Nothing goes exactly the way you plan. But when I look at where we were a year ago and compare it to the present, it's easy to see things moving in the right direction.

Here's hoping we can all say something similar a year from now. God bless and happy new year.