Toasted Toes

A new living situation always comes with challenges. Coordinating movers, organizing all of your stuff in a new space, getting your address changed in 800 different places so your mail can find you (Netflix still hasn’t figured this out and it makes me sad) meeting new neighbors, new bus routes and new appliances. The last of which has caused some strife the past several days in la casa de las Mindies.
We have a gas powered furnace that is relatively new to the house, complete with a programmable thermostat that allows us to preset times we are home/away/asleep so the temperature will automatically update based on that schedule. It’s a pretty standard setup. My roommate and I thought we’d figured it out but last night we got home to cool-ish air blowing from all the vents, no matter how high we set the temperature. Not what you want to find when the temperature is still dropping on a February evening. We pushed all the buttons, tried to reset the programming, tried to override the programming…nothing. I tried to find an owner’s manual online but came up empty handed. So in defeat we each bundled up and headed to bed. I was wearing a thermal, a sweatshirt, socks and flannel PJs…and turned my heating pad up and put it by my feet. The whole ensemble, while probably pretty unattractive was incredibly effective. About an hour later there was some activity outside by the meter. Luckily our neighbor had called the gas company and they were there to reset…something. Whatever it was, we soon had warm air coming out the vents. Oh the joy! So I went back to bed, took the heating pad out of my bed and took off the sweatshirt. In my newly toasted room, I fell asleep rather quickly and woke up to find I’d kicked off all of my blankets and sheets during the night. We didn’t reset the settings after the heat was back on and evidently we left it a little higher than it needed to be. Woops! Oh well. The lesson learned – I’m really grateful for not only a place to live but a place to live that has heat!