Now that we no longer have the little hamster to worry about we are keeping the house dramatically colder than we used to. When Dominica is around I set the thermostat to 64F but when it is just me I drop it down to 62F. At night, sometimes, I knock it down a little further. We were never able to do that before because the hamster couldn’t handle temperatures like that and had no way to keep himself warm. So he was really making it cost a lot more in utility bills. It is really handy that this winter with heating fuel being so expensive that we are able to run the furnace as little as possible. We have been being very diligent about keeping the extraneous rooms of the house sealed off so as to act as insulators to the main part of the house. We are really fortunate that the house is designed in such a way that the main living areas and areas that we would like to keep warmer are generally away from outside walls. Because it is a townhouse and the living space’s largest border wall is against our neighbor we have a naturally insulated wall on that side that we don’t have to worry about. And almost all of the outside rooms we can close off and not heat and that is a pretty major insulator to the rest of the house. So I think that we have managed to turn this house into a very energy efficient place.
I slept in a little while this morning because the puppy was being really cuddly. Then we got up and got ready to go out. Dad came over just after noon and we took my car over to Lakeville to get it inspected for my new insurance. Only took a few minutes. We have to do the same with Dominica’s car on Monday. We took Oreo along since the sun was so bright that it would keep the car relatively warm even though it was really bitterly cold outside.
We drove up to the city and met with Eric and John at the Distillery on Mt. Hope near the hospital for a late lunch. We hung out there for several hours. We arrived a little after one and didn’t end up leaving until closer to five. John had to get to the airport as he was flying back down to Maryland. Dominica and I are going down there next weekend for the company Christmas party.
I had to get back down to Geneseo to get ready to go down to Castile as I was asked to speak at the PTA meeting this evening. I wanted a little time at home before leaving to get changed and think about what we were going to talk about.
I did manage to finally get the last of my computerized music files backed up today. It took six DVD’s to fit them all. That was quite a chore moving them all and them burning them all. I only have an old 1x DVD writer and that means that it takes about one hour per disc to burn and an additional hour per disc to verify and a little longer than that even to move the files over the network. So it was a really major effort to get all of them backed up.
I left for Castile at 6:30. I got down there a little early but that was good because it gave me a chance to find out what they wanted me to talk about. The meeting started at 7:30 and ran for about an hour and a half. Then there was another hour and a half or so of “meet and greet” where the parents could talk directly to teachers. So I managed to leave the school at about 10:00 which is the same time that Dominica was leaving work.
I tried stopping at a couple of places on the way home but every place had just closed as I was going by. So I got home and played with Oreo for a little bit who was very scared because no one was home with him. Dominica got home a few minutes after I did and we decided to go out to Denny’s to get some dinner since neither of us had eated anything since lunch.
We stopped by the hotel just five minutes before Mary got out of work and drove her over to Denny’s too. We hung out there for about two hours. It started to snow pretty badly and Mary needed to get back home to Silver Springs before the roads got to be too bad.