Dearest Rachel –
I realize that it’s pointless to ask you questions that you’re not capable of answering across the void, but this morning I will anyway. Considering how the answer to this one should be obvious, I don’t think I really have to guess as to what your answer would be; when the phrase ‘room temperature’ is mentioned, what comes to your mind?
Now, to be fair, the exact number will vary from person to person; both of us used to comment about how your parents’ house was so much warmer than ours when we would visit over either the Christmas or New Years’ holidays. According to you, they never kept it that warm when you were growing up; maybe it had to do with the fact that, as they grew older, they were that much more sensitive to cold. At the same time, they had had geothermal heating installed in the house at some point after we were married and you moved up here. You always found it funny that they complained about how their heating bills didn’t drop as they were promised when they insisted on cranking the thermostat up by a good five or six degrees beyond what you remember them keeping it during your formative years.
Likewise, it will also change for a given household with the seasons. After I would get home from working out at the gym during the summer (or from walking across town from the ‘office’), even as sweaty as I was, and in need of cool relief, it was still a bit of a shock for me to open the door and get blasted with the amount of air conditioning that the house maintained (probably at Logan’s insistence, as he has that much more personal insulation that I ever had – although to his credit, he’s starting to climb down from his peak, too). Meanwhile, as winter begins to close in, the house is likely to be considerably cooler now than any of those hot summer days, regardless of my reaction to it – which, compared to the outdoors, would still be one of relief.
But with those variations taken into account, as a rule, the phrase room temperature tends to center around the nice round number that is 70° Fahrenheit (or, for everyone outside of the States, 21º Celsius, but that’s not nearly so nice and round – and 20º is a bit on the uncomfortably chilly side). And all around the world, we spend all kinds of money and effort to create devices that bring our various shelters in line with that amount, both from above and below.
Now, I’ve told you about how I’ve all but forgotten how to get the wall-mounted space heater in the bedroom to fire up anymore, and that I’ve bought a couple of small tower-style models to take over the task. And they work well; almost too well, in fact. The one on what used to be your side of the room (and which points at Daniel’s recliner when he’s in here with me) doesn’t seem to have much in the way of a regulator; it just keeps pouring hot air out, even at its mid-range setting (its low setting feels almost like a fan, so we don’t use it much). And since it’s on the other side of the room, I don’t notice it all that much.
But after spending most of yesterday in my room, neither able to willing to move from either the bed or the recliner, I finally ventured into the rest of the house to prepare something to eat (“feed a cold…” right?), only to realize that the rest of the house was shockingly cold, and the furnace wasn’t running.
Now, I did check the thermostat, and it appeared to be set for 69ºF – which it claimed was the temperature of the house overall. But I’ll tell you, it sure felt a whole lot colder than that to me. I nudged it up to 70ºF, and heard… nothing.
Oh, this is just great, I thought to myself. Just as we’re about to leave town, the furnace goes on the blink.
That’s I wandered back into the bedroom, and took a look at the tower by Daniel’s recliner. It was registering a temperature in excess of eighty degrees, and still pumping out hot air. Like I said, no regulator. And here I was, feeling like this was normal room temperature (although in my defense, I’m sure that my cold was – and still is, to a lesser extent – clouding my judgement on this matter. Plus, I might have been hoping to sweat the cold out, too). No wonder the rest of the house felt so frightfully chilly.
Still, just to check things further, I fiddled with the thermostat a little bit further, and got the furnace to switch itself on at 71ºF before Logan came down from his room to tell me he had it set where he wanted it, and would I please return it to the 69ºF he’d set it at – which, being a dad, should be part of my normal duties, anyway; it’s weird for the man of the house to be the one told to turn the thermostat down, don’t you think?
Then again, you probably had this dispute with your parents, too, especially when they complained that their heating bills were still every bit as high as they had been. It’s hard to point out that they’ve gotten used to much higher temperatures, especially when any of us can fall victim to the same assumption that wherever we are is “normal.”
