Wishing for a Thermostat

Hello! So, you might be wondering "what on Earth did you post yesterday?" You know, I don't really know the answer myself. I was looking at some old magazines and one had a crossword with a clue "Like Willie Winkie". I saw the 'Like' as 'Little' and then proceeded to make rhymes for the next few minutes. I figured on sharing it with the world, because why not, right? (and I was kind of proud of myself for thinking zinc-y pretty early on in the rhyming.)

Anyway, I'm wishing for a thermostat right now. It doesn't need to be anything fancy and I certainly don't need a digital screen - just something that can let me pick a number and have it stay there. A couple of days I talked about some numbers having meaning and others being meh. In the current context, all of the numbers have meaning by the sake of being consistent because that's what numbers do.

Typically.

To give you some context, my apartment is kind of like a large rectangle and one long edge has 11 windows. My apartment isn't huge, so I counted them out just to help visualize that outside of one stretch that includes the door frame to the bedroom, one wall is basically all windows. The building I live in is one of the oldest on campus or at least that's how the story goes. Regardless of the ranking, the building has seen better years and the windows are no exception, since they are known to being drafty. The co-worker who lives directly below me has said that she's had snow inside her apartment with all the windows closed, so my windows could definitely be worse off. This long wall is also on the west side of the building, which is where the wind hits. It's not as bad as standing in some of "wind tunnels" on campus, but thinking about some of the stuff west of me (areas for baseball, soccer, and tennis...), there's not a lot of places for the wind to lose speed.

"Well then," you say, "just keep the windows closed and run the heat." Therein lies the problem. For whatever reason, the building loves to hold onto heat, and by living in the middle of the building, heat can come from every angle. Well, except the west, but the wind has that covered. So, to a small extent, my apartment's temperature is decided by other people and those other people use the heaters. These heaters probably went to high school with the windows because they too have seen more youthful days. Some heaters have two settings of 'on' and 'still sorta on' while others have one setting - 'yes'. Also, for whatever reason, some of my heaters love being chatty. Students have wondered about the noises coming from behind them and I've told them that my tone-deaf cow is just trying to perfect the opening to "The Final Countdown" on his vuvuzela and based on how much he practices some days, he should be nearly there.

I am fortunate to say that all of my heaters have some degree of "off--some heat--all heat", but when one wall is 11 drafty windows and 4 chatty heaters all in a row, there are just some days that are touch-and-go at best. There are some days when my living room is the place to be to escape the heat, and there are some days when it's quite the opposite. If you lived on a college campus before, you can probably sympathize about the week or so when the heat is still on in the spring because a frost could come back at any moment. But it doesn't. The jerk.

I know that at this point, there's not much I can do to help the problem outside of looking for new companies to sponsor a new building. I do feel like I complain about this for a few days on end, so by writing my comments down online, I can think "oh, I've already talked about this" and move on with my life. As for why I blogged, I just couldn't stand to see a blank page and felt that a ramble would do nicely.

Aren't you so happy that you wandered onto my blog today? :-P

Tata!