Baby Its Cold Outside

As we're halfway through December I'm already ready for spring. One morning as I was scraping ice off my windshield the temperature was 22.  Anyone familiar with the northeast knows that 22 degrees is nowhere near the bottom of the winter weather spectrum.  BRRRRRR!

We've been in our house for 23 years now.  We have a steam boiler heating system and our bedroom is directly over the furnace.  The first time the heat came on we found that our room became extremely hot and stuffy.  I hate to sleep in a room that is too hot and so we turned the radiator off.  Since that time we've never opened it up again and used an electric blanket  coldest weather.  I don't like sleeping with a lot of clothing either and through the years no matter what I weighed I managed to be comfortable.  We've gone through a lot of electric blankets over the years.  In addition when the heat is turned off in our room it distributes to the rest of the house more evenly.

This year I can't take it anymore.  I have been wearing sweats and socks to bed.  Even with the blanket set at nuclear level it has taken me a while to get comfortable.  I've been so cold that one night my husband, not so discreetly, made a little wall with the blankets between us so my cold wouldn't rub off on him.  I finally decided to open up the valve of the radiator.  My husband asked if I thought it was the weight loss that made the difference.  Well, yeah.  170 pounds of insulation makes a huge difference!

I used to think that being cold burned more calories.  It makes sense, right?  You need fuel to make heat.  I read that mountain climbers in the Himalayas or explorers in Antarctica have to eat 5000 calories a day to prevent losing muscle tissue.  Surely that should translate into more calories burned if the thermostat is set at 60 degrees in our house in the winter.  Well through the years I haven't noticed anyone in our home looking too lean in the cold months.  So much for theoretical dieting.

I have given away all my old winter coats because they were too big.  I refuse to buy a new coat before Christmas when I know they'll be on sale the day after.  So in the meantime I'm dressing in layers.  Lots of layers.

My husband couldn't be happier when I gave away my brown microsuede parka.  That coat was a bit of a menace.  It had lots of pockets, drawstrings and flaps. It was soft and very warm but I was always getting caught on things with it.  TWICE I got a flap caught on my turn signal in my Buick snapping the thing off completely.  Now I was much bigger back then and squeezing into the driver's seat was difficult. But this coat just was out of control.  The second time I broke it I didn't even want to go home and face my husband's anger.  The repair was about three hundred dollars each time and I had to rent a car as well.

Another time the coat turned me into a shoplifter!  I went to a pharmacy to pick up a prescription for my mother in law.  When I got out of the car at home I noticed that caught on one of the dangling strings was a pegboard rod with about six Chapsticks hanging from it.  There was a display under the counter at the pharmacy and my coat stole the whole row!  I was way too embarrassed to go back to the store and explain.

When I go to the gym I usually do my weight training first and then the stationary bike.  The week that I went five times I only did the weights three of those days.  I found if I go straight to the bike from the outside my hands are so cold that the sensors on the handlebars don't pick up my pulse.  I have to ride for a while on manual before I can set it to cardio which monitors the pulse and changes the resistance to maintain the target rate.  If I do the weights first I get warmed up sufficiently.

So it looks like it's gonna be a long, long winter. No matter what anyone says I'm not buying the global warming thing until I see palm trees growing in New York.

Love to all,
Marlena of Mohegan