I hate temperature fluctuations

The one thing that drives me absolutely nuts in terms of the weather is temperature fluctuations. I don't mean the changing of the seasons, though to be honest I would much prefer it if it was always around 22 C (72 F - I hope the Americans appreciate all my efforts to do conversions for them, even though they may be wrong). No what I truly hate are the rapid changes in temperature, the kind where it goes from -5 C (22 F) to -25 C (-13 F) within 24 hours. I swear that happened at least twice last winter in Edmonton.

Of course these types of temperature fluctuations are inevitable; thankfully we live in a modern society and have good shelter from the elements. Most importantly to those of us in northern climates is heating, I assume that my regular readers from Hawaii and Malaysia aren't overly concerned with home heating systems, cooling yes, heating no. But it's comforting to know that no matter how cold it gets outside you can come home to the ideal 22 C (sorry, you only get each conversion once per blog). Or if you live with my parents, the slightly less comfortable, 16 C (62 F). It's kind of funny that when I visit them it's the only time that I pack and actually wear sweaters, and I curse myself each time I forget to bring the slippers (ok, I forget every time) that I never wear at my own place.

The house where I lived in Edmonton had a fabulous digital thermostat. It was set to keep the house nicely warm when most people were home. And by nicely warm I mean around 24 C (75 F), but what would you expect with multiple roommates from Iran, India and undetermined African nations. Hell, some of them started wearing tuques as early as August. Oh, if you are wondering about the link (you must be Canadian) because it's to inform non-Canadians what a tuque is. In the US it's called a hat, they are an odd bunch down here. The real benefit of the digital thermostat was that you could control the furnace temperature to cool the house a bit at night, to around 18 C (65 F) which made sleeping very comfortable, and saved energy (what a noble idea).

Well, my current residence is in an old apartment building, so it's kind of lacking in things like digital thermostats, or even double-pane windows for that matter. No this place relies on hot water radiators to heat each room. The up side to this is that I do not have to pay for heating (at least not directly, I know it's paid for in my rent, any bets on whether or not my rent goes up next year?). The downside though, is the ability to control the temperature, and I swear, there is someone fucking with the water for the radiators just to make it as hard as possible to keep a stable temperature.

Last week I didn't spend all that much time at my place. So when I came home one evening to the rather balmy temperature of 26 C (80 F) I figured it would be a good idea to nearly close the valves on the radiators and crack the windows a bit to get things to cool off. That night I didn't spend the night at home and I only returned to my place with Deirdre after Thanksgiving dinner at her parent's place, a couple of days later. This was when I realized that the temperature in the apartment had dropped to about 14 C (56 F), needless to say nobody was very happy with this. So I cranked open the radiator valves and closed the windows; the problem is that the water doesn't flow continuously through the radiators, it's sporadic; the only time I know for sure that the water is flowing is 4 am; the air bubbles knocking in the radiators woke me up constantly in April. (For those wondering about the semicolon use, I'm reading "Eats, Shoots and Leaves", a really good book on punctuation rules, so does anyone know if I used the semicolon properly?). So because of that the apartment wasn't much above 18 C the following morning, so when we left, I figured I would leave everything as it was.

Well upon returning to my place Monday night, I found that I was now the proud tenant of the tropical apartment, it was 30 C (85 F) in there! If my place was a German school I would have donned my swimsuit. Now I don't know about you, but when I'm not the type of person to sweat when sitting under a ceiling fan, but Monday night I was. So I fiddled with the radiators again, keeping the windows closed this time, by morning it was a bit chilly, but I had just gotten out of bed, so I expected as much. Well it seems that I hadn't achieved the proper balance just yet, because when I came home the apartment was 16 C, it reminded me of my parents place (I dug out the slippers right away).

I finally have the temperature right where I like it, 22 C. I'll let you know tomorrow if I wake up in a tropical hell or frozen wasteland.