radiant fracture

Thank you for the brilliant reading suggestions on dragonology and unicornalia. I loved the discussion. My book stack is now so complex that it has achieved sentience and named itself. (It won't tell me the name yet. I haven't earned it, apparently).

One enters as one leaves: In order to tame it a little, I had given a name to the giant pile of Stuff in the main room. Unfortunately, I named it Hortense, so you can surmise how well that worked.

However, after a big push this weekend, the Beautiful Shed is transformed. My parents were in town for the weekend and they made much possible, including two trips to the recycling centre and one to the carpet warehouse.

I found a rug I think will be suitable...

( Do you see it? )

The place looks so tidy now that it hardly seems to be mine, though that's only true if you don't go into the back hallway or up to the loft.

It's an incredible relief to feel as though I have a house again and not just a museum of poor decision-making.

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The Beautiful Shed is hard to heat. It was, after all, born a garage, or possibly a barn (I'm not sure how old the main house is -- pre-1925, anyway, but the shed could have been built later).

The insulation is of that peculiar kind that amplifies heat in summer and collects and stores icy air in winter.

These vintage honey-brown carriage-house doors (points grandly) were made to keep horses and cars contained, and only nominally to exclude the weather. I have stopped up the gap with a draught-roll, a knotted-up jacket, and numerous unwanted volumes of Samuel Richardson. The pinhole that allows a Borrower-sized search beam through one door I have blocked with washi tape.

For many years the landlords included the hydro (that is, the power) with the rent (which itself is generously low). They also hadn't raised that rent in the eight years I've been here. This summer they did raise the rent (but very little) and also began charging for hydro. This all seemed perfectly reasonable. My total cost increase was about 7.5%: 3% for the rent increase and 4.5% for the hydro.

Then, at the end of November, my landlord sheepishly presented me with a doubled power bill and an offer to instruct me in the use of the thermostat.

I could explain to him that I set the thermostat where it is for a reason: if the Beautiful Shed isn't kept at a reasonable minimum temperature, it doesn't heat up at all, or not for many hours.

I could ask him to add some weatherproofing over the scenic gaps around the doors.

The only thing that stops me from taking these sensible steps is that I didn't do any of these things while he was paying for the heat, and now it seems... unsporting?

Still, my landlord clearly felt that the rate was excessive, and so now I feel obligated to take steps to reduce my costs to spare him embarrassment.

I have therefore stepped down both the low and the high temperature settings on the thermostat. This means that the shed is never entirely comfortable, but it does provide opportunities to wear my new onesies (a. moose b. bat).

Someone gave me a weatherproofing kit, so I could choose to stick up plastic sheeting inside all of my (single-pane) windows (though not the skylights). But then I would have plastic sheeting stuck in all of my windows. It seems almost worth the monthly fee just not to have to look at that. This is, of course, the sort of poor decision-making that results in empty savings accounts (mine).

It isn't that I have some infinite wellspring of hydro payments: what I have is extremely finite mental energy for focusing on money -- partly temperament, partly the bad years when thinking about it just made it more depressing. I need to become the sort of person that is responsible about these things, if I want to become the sort of person who can heat a house in old age, but it is sometimes a mortifyingly slow process.

Mind, sealing the windows wouldn't fix the knee-high miasma of cold air that drifts constantly from the corner cupboard, which I suspect has some kind of direct channel to the outside world, or possibly Antarctica, though I've never climbed in far enough to be sure. I use it to chill drinks all the time.

Maybe the answer, for the winter months at least, is to find some heavy curtains from the thrift store. I don't like shutting out the sunlight, but how much of that is there right now anyway? I have one circa 1970s royal purple velvet curtain (formerly of my parents' bedroom) that does very well for half of the front doors. I wonder if I can find it a mate.

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