the great storm of 2022, cont.

It’s warm in the kitchen in the morning sun.

I don’t entirely understand how this works. Obviously the sun warms things up. But my thermostat is set to a constant 65 degrees. I would expect the sun’s warmth to reduce the burden on my furnace, meaning it has to expend less fuel to maintain the same temperature and my power bill goes down, but the house should still feel the same, no? It’s still exactly 65 degrees regardless.

I’ll take it, though. The storm was pathetic in terms of snowfall—we got barely an inch—but temperatures plummeted in its wake. Yesterday was -5 degrees, windchill of -31.

After the lockdown of 2020, I developed a personal rule that I have to go outside every day, and I have to take a walk every day, but particularly in cases of inclement weather, the walk does not have to be outside. So it was yesterday. I briefly ducked outside to take out the trash, maybe 30 steps from the porch, and that was plenty of outside for me.

Today the temperature rose to a balmy 10 degrees (windchill of -10). I took a roughly 10-minute walk around the condo grounds, although I decided not to venture out for the pokestop of the day. Most of the walkways were still unshoveled. The snow clearing here is honestly garbage. Our old apartment managers were a bunch of slumlords, but at least they knew how to hire someone to keep the sidewalk shoveled. Here it’s the most wildly perfunctory service you can imagine, plus salt buckets placed suggestively in the entrance foyers in case you want to DIY.

In any case, looks like we’re getting a white Christmas! Next week the temperature is going up to 51 degrees. This season has been absolutely wild.