The heat game

Today is an auspicious day in the Goldsteen household. Today is the day we turned on the heat.

When we moved to this house almost three years ago, we experienced a severe case of utility sticker shock. We expected our utility bill to roughly double. We thought this was a reasonable assumption, because our new house is roughly one-third larger than our previous house. You can imagine our surprise that first winter when the utilities bill was closer to three times as much as we had previously paid. I think this had something to do with an unfortunate confluence of rising natural gas prices, and an older, and thus more inefficient house.

And now, every year, when the weather turns cold, when I look through my lovely old windows, with their rippling pains of glass, I no longer appreciate their beauty, and the way they frame the views. All I can see is THEY ARE COSTING ME A FUCKING FORTUNE. I do, however, appreciate the irony in the fact that we cannot yet afford to replace them.

David has gone on aggressive fact-finding missions, searching out and sealing any obvious leaks, which has shaved approximately ten dollars from our average bill.

And thus, we began to play the heat game.

The heat game is familiar to many homeowners. There are two primary aspects; How Low Can You Go, and How Long Can You Wait?

How Low Can You Go is the less challenging aspect of the game; for amateurs, if you will. My daytime threshold is sixty-seven degrees. Sixty-eight degrees is more comfortable to me, but it's nothing that a sweater, a few additional trips up and down the stairs a little extra vacuuming won't cure. At night, we go down to sixty-four degrees, and we are thinking that perhaps this year, we may try to beat this personal best, and go to sixty-three, or maybe even sixty-two.

Once you agree to play How Long Can You Wait, you have made it to the pros. You start by assigning an arbitrary date before which you will not turn on the heat, NO MATTER WHAT.

And then, you wait.

Our date is October 15, and it has given me a new appreciation as to how cold sixty degrees really is without benefit of sunlight. Sixty degrees is cold enough that I have been wearing two sweaters, a scarf, and a hat indoors. If it didn't impair my fine motor skills so much, I would opt for gloves as well. I look fairly ridiculous, but no less so than my friend Sharon, who equips herself for the heat game by creating a DIY Snuggie made from a blanket she wraps taut around her body as one does post-shower, so that she ends up looking like a ragtag Bedouin.

The heat game means I run the risk of becoming dangerously over caffeinated, because instead of one or two cups of coffee a day, I make cup after cup, so as not to be without a warm mug in my hands. Hot beverages have the added bonus of providing temporary relief to the tip of my frozen nose.

The heat game is very good for certain aspects of housekeeping. The floors are very clean, because vacuuming and mopping are good aerobic activities. Bathroom cleaning ranks low, because while scrubbing the tub is effective for raising body temperature, coming into contact with the water necessary for rinsing would negate its aerobic effect.

I felt a little guilty this year because I cheated when I brought a space heater down from the attic on Monday. The kids were off from school, and while it is one thing to subject myself to such deprivations, it seemed a mercy not to inflict suffering on my children unnecessarily. This gave me the added bonus of getting to watch my children duke it out fighting for primacy in front of the heater, in a true depression-style amusement.

This morning when we awoke, David and I looked at each other and nodded in agreement. We had endured long enough, and it was indeed time. On my way out to take the kids to school, I flicked the switch on the thermostat, and when I arrived home, I was greeted by the metallic smell of water moving blessedly through the radiators.

Yet even as my muscles began to loosen, and my teeth unclench, and my fingers thaw, I found myself wondering, if perhaps next year, we could hold out just a few days longer.

Such is the perverse logic of the heat game. 

He is a good dad

Yesterday was opening day at the Montclair Beach Club, something my children were looking forward to with great anticipation. As Saturday approached, Sarah and a friend began planning where they would rendezvous as if it were a college reunion, and they lived on opposite ends of the country. (They see each other every day, in school.)

They made elaborate plans to meet by the diving board at 1.30. And they had back-up plans for where they could find each other if, by chance, one of them wasn't at the diving board 1.30. If I don't see you at the diving board, proceed to the playground. And if you are not there, then, go to the snack bar. All of this planning was adorable, amusing, but highly unnecessary, as the Montclair Beach Club is not a very big place; if you take a lap around the pool, you are bound to run into someone.

We were fortunate that it was a nice day, because as far as my children were concerned, there was no way we were not going. But it is still early in the season, and since we've had a cold spring, the water was sure to be FREEZING, so there was NO WAY I was getting in the pool. As I have gotten older, my intolerance for cold has increased to the point where I now understand why people move to warmer climes as they age, something I would have made fun of in my youth. So sure was I that I was not stepping foot in the pool, I didn't even bother with a swimsuit.

The problem is, that while Sarah and Gabriel are competent swimmers, capable of going in the water by themselves, Sacha, at 3, is most certainly not.

And this is what dads are for.

So my pale, tender skinned, balding husband (who is also very handsome; it occurs to me that this description does not paint an especially attractive picture), whose pate will burn on an overcast spring day, should he forget to wear a hat, suited up.

And so we arrived, and off he went, with me trailing behind, to empathize with his pain. He winced as he descended into the cold. I believe I saw his skin grow two sizes too small. But he got in that pool, and played with our kids. He splashed and threw them about. He held out his arms for them to jump into.

He even played with some other people's kids, the ones who are old enough to swim unaccompanied, but still enjoy having an adult roughhouse with them in the water, whose parents now have the luxury of sitting on a chaise reading, while their children swim. Bitches.

At one point, as Gabriel dragged him in for another round of water play, I heard David wimper, with a tremor in his voice, "Oh no, not the mushroom again!" (The mushroom is a cascading waterfall in the center of the pool shaped like...a giant penis.)

By the time we went home, David, who normally runs hot, was shell-shocked from the cold. He was visibly shivering, even once he was dry and in clean clothes.

I believe his gonads descended some time around 9pm.

So props to him, and all the other dads who braved the cold to play with their kids.