Thermal Wars
By Bob Stevens, The Muddled Male
This time of year is tough on our marriage. While I, the Muddled Male, am worrying about comfort, Ann, my wife, thinks only about frugality. I articulated in a previous column (Ann would say bloviated) about my theory regarding the difference in temperature demands of husbands versus wives where the husband plays the part of Wile E. Coyote and the wife plays the part of the Road Runner. In that previous dissertation I pointed out that men are simple, analog creatures who move gradually between body temperatures, thus being able to predict ahead of time the need for a future temperature adjustment. If the man is working in the sun and begins to feel warm he can move to the shade for a few minutes, drink a cold lemonade, and go back to work in the sun. If he is outside and the sun goes down causing him to cool down too much he can work harder or put on a light jacket and be good to go.
A woman, on the other hand, is a binary creature. She is either too cold or too warm with nothing in between. She moves instantly from cold to hot without ever passing through comfortable. That is because the temperature a woman feels often has nothing to do with temperature. It is more about hormones. If you are a husband past middle age you will remember the exact moment the change occurred. You were driving down the road on a cold winter day. The windows were up, the heater was running, and you were feeling warm and cozy. In an instant all the windows went down and your wife was fanning herself with a magazine while asking, “Does it feel awfully hot in here to you?”
Well, Ann has added frugality to her game of “are you warm, are you cold?” During this time of year, evenings are often cool even when the days are warm. So Ann opens the doors and windows at night to let in as much cold air as possible and then store it in the house during the night as a way of avoiding the use of the air conditioner as long as possible the next day. Now I admit I admire her frugality, but I am freezing to death during the storage period. I am, in fact, sitting here in a warm coat and shivering while typing this column because Ann is running the air conditioner to make certain that the inside air is as cold as the outside air so that we don’t waste any of the outside air by needing to cool the house down to the temperature of the air coming through the door. Sometimes we find that we have stored so much cold that we have to turn the furnace on the next morning before we dare crawl out of bed.
Like Wile E. Coyote I ordered a small personal heater from the Acme Company to keep me from freezing. But like the Road Runner, Ann has hidden it somewhere so that there is no chance that I might use extra electricity and burn the house down. I am willing to be adopted if you keep your house warm. If that doesn’t work, think of me as that guy standing on the street corner holding up a cardboard sign that says, “Will work for heat.” You can reach me at muddledmale@gmail.com
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