The Illusion of Control

Now is the winter of our discontent, or at least of wishing this house were somewhat better insulated. A pier-and-beam foundation? And hard floors? And an original central heating system dating from the late 17th century? (I don't know, I guess the developer just found it here in the forest and decided to build a house around it. They were always doing crazy things like that in the 20s and 30s, you know.) These mean the house is just going to be very, very chilly once the outside temperature drops below 40.

But my parents, again, think it's positively balmy here.

We have climate control issues at work, too. Our division resides in a single ginormous room divided into standard-issue beige cubicles, right? Well, the air conditioning really only works in the interior of the room, and works extremely well. I kept a space heater at my desk. But at the periphery of the room, close to the windows, the temperature may run into the mid-80s, so that even our cheap-ass agency is willing to spring for fans. If you have enough employees perish from heat prostration, you can get the skivvies sued right off of you, and I'm sure that isn't in the budget. And you know, I never thought of this before, but our climate control problems might be the reason why Coworker-You-Idiot always wears the zip-off pants. Perhaps he receives official in-building weather forecasts on that little set of headphones with the antenna that he wears around everywhere, and which you can see, from anywhere in the division, bobbing along over the tops of the cubicle walls.

Or maybe he's just weird.

Anyway, it's late, and I'm tired, and I'm very very cold (but personality isn't everything, right?), and I guess I'll just go crawl into a nice warm bed with my nice warm punching kicking Anna, and hope it's sunny enough tomorrow that I can bear to go outside.

And I'm thinking Friday, weather permitting, I might bring my parents to afternoon break.