My heating bill for December was $300, even though it was warm enough not to really need heat for the first two weeks and I was in the Midwest for the last two. I realized there was a going to be a problem when I got home from my trip and discovered I had left the heat on, albeit at a relatively low temperature (62 degrees). I realized this problem was going to be a bigger one when I discovered that the door to my screen porch had somehow blown open while I was gone, meaning I had two weeks of my radiator attempting to raise the whole of Cambridge up to 62 degrees.
A main intellectual interest of mine, stated in the abstract, is how stable psychological characteristics of people can have quite different implications depending on their surrounding social/cultural/technological environment. Let's just say that my absent-mindedness has combined with various aspects of my life in Cambridge in ways that have been very expensive.
Even so, I've ordered an elliptical trainer. Something had to be done on that front, and there is no easier step toward fitness than the exercise of one's credit card.
* Original post here.
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4 comments:
Ouch, 300 bucks. For an apartment, right? Brings me back to my days in a charming but draughty woodframe house on Orange St in New Haven. We had those kind of bills for heating in the winter and cooling in the summer. Now we live in a partly solar-powered home in Tucson. Our average electricity bill (all in, not just the heat) is about $70 a month, with a high of maybe fifteen dollars more than that for the hottest and coldest months of the year. Hurray for energy-efficient homes.
Nothing like working out to bump up that body temperature! But, you'll be cold when you get out of the shower that follows.
Have you ever considered setting up a "winter room". My grandmother used to do it. Basically she'd bung up the registers, seal off the windows, and jam the doors to all the rooms in her house but one - perferably one with access to a stove and a toilet - and then just pay to heat that one room all winter. It means having a bed in your kitchen all winter, but sometimes it's worth it.
You could just get an iron stove and burn dollar bills to stay warm. Would be more fun!
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