Since the Stone Age, people have been trying to figure out how to stay warm.  For about 8,000 years, the best method anybody could come up with was to climb inside of a wooly mammoth carcass.  This strategy was hard because it involved killing a wooly mammoth in a place you didn’t mind hanging out.  It also took a bit of a hit when PETA staged its first protest which was confusing because what they mostly did was hit people they believed to be engaging in the practice over the head with clubs and grunting, which was what people mostly did then anyway when they didn’t have anything else to do so at first, the act did not carry any special significance.  Eventually, one of the biggest pop stars of the time came to the central cave and explained, in a shrill voice, her objection to the practice.  People were annoyed, but understood her position for the most part until somebody hit her with a club. 

Despite not being swayed by the protest, people did realize there was a time for a change and the first thing they did to address the cold was to wear additional clothing which, despite widely held belief to the contrary, performed better in most circumstances than the ill-fitting loincloth they’d all been wearing, though admittedly, it did little or nothing to provide anything resembling athletic support.  This was not ideal, because at the time, the only sports people did were trying not to get eaten by other people, and trying to stay warm, both of which involved a lot of running. 

After they covered more of their skin, the next step was to invent fire, which took a while to catch on because everyone was concerned about burning things down.  This sentiment pretty much ruled the day until somebody pointed out that most of what people had wasn’t really prone to destruction by fire, at which point he was clubbed over the head and placed inside of a wooly mammoth.

Things went on like this for a long time until Benjamin Franklin figured out that the best way to heat one’s house without dying of carbon monoxide poisoning was to have a stove that ran on wood, and that in a bizzare twist, someone had already designed such a thing and named it after him.   Franklin was a staunch supporter of the stove even though he admitted that shoveling coal for fires had more poetic quality when used in books and movies featuring crippled children and Christmas ghosts than did wood stoves.

I don’t have any proof, but I am relatively certain that somewhere between the time of the mastodons and Franklin’s invention, there was a heating system installed in the house I currently inhabit.  For the first two years we lived in our current abode our heat problem was of the “sleeping in sweat suits despite spending $600 per month to heat 1,000 square feet" variety but with a few minor changes to the house and the addition of a very clever space heater has been reduced to a “not being able to feel our feet despite spending $350 per month problem”, which, considering we have no insulation, is a giant step forward.

The persistent spot of bother is our bedroom, which, mostly because it is located above a garage, and has no insulation, and 15-foot peaked roof, and no functioning radiators, operates as a walk-in freezer for my wife’s 3,000 pairs of jeans.

In the fall we resolved to address the problem and did so by arguing about what we should do, and then purchasing several yards of the cheapest muslin we could find and then leaving it on the dining room table for three months.  Eventually, when I was bored one afternoon, I cut the muslin into strips, fashioned it into a curtain using double-sided tape, and then painstakingly stapled it 4,000 times in such a way that it separated the dormer which houses our bed, from the rest of the room.  My wife was generally displeased with my vision for the curtain but thrilled by the way it trapped heat from our space heater into the area around our bed.  We both went to sleep that night believing we’d solved our problem but when we awoke to find ourselves so dry that we were unable to blink we changed our minds.

For the past month or so we’ve been running our Cadillac heater in the room an hour or two before we go to bed and setting it to turn on an hour or two before we wake up and have found this to work just fine.  But just yesterday, I arrived home to find that my wife made a second attempt at fashioning a curtain, this time using fabric that chapped my lips just looking at it.  Judging from my condition this morning it performed about as well as the prior so I imagine it’ll be taken down before tomorrow.

I wasn’t able to talk to my wife about it this morning as I was still wearing a balaclava, but if I can get enough saliva in my mouth by the time she gets home tonight I’ll suggest covering the floor with jeans.