Perhaps you have been "wonder(ing) what kind of whack-o schemes and projects that wing-nut Turbo has been up to lately" (ref). If you're not already reading his cold house journal, you should be. It's my current favourite read, though it has the unfortunate side effect that I find myself staring at my thermostat, feeling all pink and wimpy. In any case, you can't say he's not eccentric, and my affinity for eccentrics is long established. The other day, I was ranting about people being sheep (as you do, no?) to someone who knows me well, and he pointed out that of course I'm drawn to the wing-nuts, look at where I grew up and all. I'm not sure what he was trying to say about rural northern Ontario, come to think of it...
In other news, my current hobby seems to be snow shoveling. At least, I'd rather declare it my hobby and thus enjoy it than view it as a dreaded chore. Because, hey, snow! Lots of it! And more coming! What is not to like?
I turned the furnace on way back in October. By the time Turbo started spreading the evangelism of human cold adaptation, I had already figured out how to program my thermostat. I was not playing. My house is already cold! (how cold? my brother is visiting, and he wears his fleece pants under his jeans and his jacket the entire time he is inside - even though I told him it was ok to override the miserly thermostat pre-sets) As far as I was concerned, this not turning on the furnace in our climate is a crackpot idea indeed, and being a wimp is much more comfortable than being a crackpot. But being a crackpot makes you famous.
However, feeling like a wimp has become a full-time job of late. Every time I read the Turboblog or talk to the Crackpot himself, really. It's not entirely unwelcome - being obsessed with not being enough of a cold miser meant that I put the insulating plastic on all the windows weeks earlier than I would otherwise have done, for instance. While eating my lunch in my office, I make lists all the electricity-leaking things I have plugged in that could be clustered on power strips (e.g. power adapters for turned off laptops, cell phone charger, the t.v. antenna, the VCR, the DVD player...) Night before last, I did a few laps of the basement following my copper pipes until they disappeared into the bowels of the house, trying to figure out how much pipe insulation I should buy. I have reprogrammed the thermostat twice now, both times to a more miserable setting, both times after reading the Turboblog. I replaced the light bulbs in my lamps with the miser kind from Ikea (the "sparsam" line. It is no coincidence that this word translates to frugal, now, is it?) I cringe if a visitor to my home wants me to turn on the chandelier over the dining room table, since it has eight (eight!) 50W bulbs, none of them of the sparsam variety. I've concluded that my front-loading washing machine can wash everything on cold and it will still be clean. I put my laundry racks into the spare room, the same spare room that shares a furnace duct with my bedroom. By covering up the spare room vent, my bedroom is comparatively warmer, and I dropped the overnight setting even lower. I realized I was heading toward crackpottery myself when, the other night, I decided a) that it would use less electricity to make chicken stock in the pressure cooker (it does. it's faster too.) and b) I would be wasting the heat from the pressure cooker if, once I was done with it, I put it outside in a snow bank to cool off so the fat could congeal, I should have it sit on the range and emit heat all night! (Before you get all, but bacteria will grow that way! on me, consider this: an unopened pressure cooker should keep the bugs out until I open it, and obviously, none survived the pressure cooking. Consider also that the next step involves putting the stock into canning jars, which I again process in the pressure cooker so I don't have to refrigerate them.)
But man, I feel so guilty about my house being warm enough to not make a styrofoam toilet seat appealing (this was my father's solution to the winter they were building the new house and only had an outhouse). It's akin to the guilt I would feel if I used throw away coffee cups, bought Chilean raspberries in January, or sprayed glyphosate on the plants growing in the cracks on my driveway. But those three things, those are silly, unnecessary things. Heat is not, to most human beings.
You know, it does occur to me, the zeal to make the everyday little changes is usually strongest among the young and recently converted. I am no stranger to crunchy communities, and like most people, I have become less and less militant about these things as I get older. So I find it intriguing, this slight but perceptible shift in the other direction again in the last year or two. Consider that in the last couple of years I:
But I still feel guilty, because I am not freezing cold. I blame the crackpot. I'm sure he'll come out with a post on the insulating qualities of a hair shirt eventually. Sigh.