Question: Favourite thing about this time of year

[krait]

A while ago, kass gave me five questions to answer, and I'm finally getting around to them! Not necessarily in order.

4. What is your favorite thing about this time of year where you live?

The short answer to this question is - not much!

Any temperature below 60 degrees F is too cold for me, and more than 10 inches of Water From The Sky per year is excessive by my measure. (I'm a desert native, is it obvious?) I hate being cold, and I hate being precipitated upon; fall/winter in my locale is pretty much six months of exactly that. I spend pretty much all of it complaining about my house's lack of insulation and my heating bill, and not wanting to get up in the mornings because it's dark.

The primary upsides are Christmas and cats.

Christmas foods, Christmas presents, and Christmas decorations are things I enjoy, in various degrees. Even Christmas music can be nice. (Horrible pop-music renditions of secular Christmas or "Christmas" songs in shops, however, are a plague.) On the fannish side, there's Yuletide, and my annual tea mailing/card exchange! I really miss the days of LJ's holiday wishlist comm, too; every year I find myself wondering if I could track down whomever created it and take it over, or just start another one. It was such a wonderful part of the season!

Cats are the other upside to the season: when it's cold in the house, the cats get cuddly. :D I've spent the last two nights with them draped over my legs on the sofa, whereas during the warmer months they tend to spend the evenings in their armchair instead of atop me.


(This reminds me: I need to make a cats post!)

Comments

[ursula]

Sounds like you should check out holiday_wishes?

[krait]

IT LIVES!!!!

Wow, I'm so pleased! I had been checking its dead sibling holidaywishes all along; I feel silly now. :D Thanks for the link!

...Now I have to try to come up with ten things to wish for.

[lokifan]

Maybe fandom_stocking, too, which has had its deadline extended for stuffing the stockings!

[extrapenguin]

Send all the cold my way! :D As a native of winterland, civilized temperatures end at 20°C (68°F); anything above that is too hot for clothing i.e. civilization. Before, it used to be that there were but a few days of summer when it went above 25°C (77°F), but global warming means that now we get weeks of temperatures above 30°C (86°F) and I melt. (The temperatures from -2°C to 1°C are pretty miserable if wet, too, since all that slush and ice.)

On the insulation front, perhaps thick curtains could help? As well as mats. Block drafts from doors and windows with textiles and special doorstop things that look like stuffed snakes.

[krait]

You can have it! *shoos it toward you* Meanwhile, send me that +86°, because that's really just perfect as far as I'm concerned. When I lived in my native desert, I was happily active outside into the 90-110°F weather; dry heat is hardly heat at all to me. The highest temp on record happened when I was there - still unbroken, though I think it's been tied once or twice since - and it was 122°F. So 86 is nothing! :D

Slush and ice is the worst, isn't it? At least snow is pretty, and dry is convenient for getting around! Slushy stuff just hangs around getting muckier and freezing over into a slick killer shell at night. Blegh!

The biggest problem with my house is that there aren't enough return registers for the heating downstairs (there's... one), so the heat doesn't circulate efficiently and it exacerbates the usual problem of all the heat wanting to go upstairs.

I only have two doors (front and back), so I don't think they're big contributors to heat loss. But I don't actually have any curtains at this time! There are blinds in the front windows and shutter-blinds on the back windows. The shutter-blinds at the least would have to come down before I could put up any kind of curtain, and that's a project for spring...

I guess another problem is that I don't have a fireplace screen for the fireplace, and therefore don't use it (it needs a screen that's large enough to completely block the opening, and stable enough that my cats can't get past it). But it's not like I would leave the fireplace going overnight/when I'm away at work, so it's not really helpful for two-thirds of the day anyway.

[extrapenguin]

Dry is best; 3°C (37°F) wet feels worse than -25°C (-13°F) dry because it just seeps into the bones and sucks hardcore. I'm glad to live inland... (Also, 122°F is 50°C which sounds like someone left the sauna warming to the last minute, so how the hell is one supposed to wear clothes in that?)

Putting up thick curtains on the front windows should help! Figuring out how to get the heat to circulate is trickier – selective door-openings and door-closings, or setting up internal curtains to chop up the air mass of open-plan floors? If your house is at all usefully constructed, running the fireplace will warm up the structures, keeping the house warm for much longer than it's actually on.