Indulge me a moment, if you will, while I complain about the cold weather. I know, I live in Florida and enjoy a lovely Atlantic beachlife, but it’s totally cold here. I realize that much of the country is suffering from frigid temperatures and a very cold winter overall but we just aren’t prepared for temperatures near 20 degrees. It kills our tropical plants if we don’t cover them (I do get rather attached to my landscape, particularly my Pygmy date palms and gingers). But the worst thing about the cold is the cold in this house.
It’s not warm in here. What’s the problem? Could it be the high ceilings? Is the heat that is pouring continuously from the furnace (there go the Benjamins) gathering up there? It is, as it’s cozy warm in the house’s second story, in the kids’ rooms, but in the Master bedroom the temperature last night was fifty-eight degrees when I dove into bed and under the covers. That’s 58 degrees in the room, when it was in the 20s outside. Other rooms in this house are absolutely frosty. We cannot even go into our “sun room”. I can feel the brisk air from that room creeping into the kitchen from the crack between the french doors that separate the rooms. It’s too bad, too, since that’s where the family TV is (and it’s a good TV, too, a new one, a big one…but no one wants to brave the cold in there.)
We are shivering in front of the space heaters several hours a day. And for the first time ever (last night) I kept the space heater running in the bedroom all night long. I don’t mind chilly when I’m sleeping but fifty-eight degrees? Um, no.
Tonight it promises to be even colder and the weather reports this is the coldest cold this area’s seen in a quarter century. We’ve been living Atlantic beachlife for eight winters now and while it has gotten colder at times than I’d thought Florida would be, it’s not been like this. At this point I wish it would just snow and thrill the kids. You should have heard them this morning when I pointed out a frozen puddle. Heck, you should have heard me this morning when I saw it. Then I drove past an unfortunate neighbor’s house, who’d forgotten the irrigation was set to ‘on’ and had a lovely icile-laden landscape. It really was quite the scene, here at the beach. Being from the north I’m familiar with such vignettes but the kids I had with me were thrilled.
My lovely little Weather Bug app on the iPhone indicates the temperatures are on the way up for later in the week and on into the weekend. It appears things will be back where they belong for the third week of January. I check this thing several times a day (it’s 33 degrees at the moment) which means it’s officially just five degrees colder than it is in Michigan (home state). This is global warming? Weather Bug predicts a low of 20 degrees here in Atlantic Beach tonight.
Certainly we’re fortunate that we do have a (fairly) warm place to sleep; we aren’t sleeping outside or in a shelter. But I’ll be happy when the frost is off our windows and it no longer feels like the outside, inside.
I live in Virginia, and the other night it was 7 degrees- I thought I’d die! But then another one of my blog friends posted that it was -16 where she was, and then I felt like a baby. I think it’s all in what you get used to, 58 degrees in your bedroom is pretty freaking cold! Try closing the vents upstairs a little and make sure yours are completely open, that’s the only free thing I can think of. Good luck staying warm!
I wish it would snow too but it is March.