The Weather Outside is Frightful

It was co-ooold this week. I realize that to yankees reading this, the twenties are reason to wear sandals and wifebeaters, but for Florida, it's cold. Cold enough that I ran around like an asshole covering up plants that will end up dying through my neglect anyway and wondering if I should run the faucets like the news tells me to do.

Since my house was built in the '20s, it offers little in the way of insulation. I probably would have been warmer outside, especially since my heat decided to die over the weekend. I'm too cheap and frightened to buy a space heater, mostly because I feel I've already cheated death with one earlier and I don't want to push my luck.

Back in the mid '90s my roommate Todd and I had a pretty awesome house. I had what was originally the living room as my bedroom, and he had an actual bedroom. It didn't have heat or AC, but I don't remember it getting too hot, mostly because my mattress was in the corner between two windows and there was always a nice breeze coming through. Winter was different, however. The same windows that made summer so pleasant let in a never ending stream of arctic air thorough my sleeping body. So I came up with a solution.

We found a couple of ancient space heaters up in the attic and each took one. These things were almost rusted through with layers of electrical tape wrapped around the cords. They would constantly trip the breakers, requiring us to walk out in the cold to fix it.

Since the heaters didn't have much range, I came up with an ingenious solution. I placed it on a board on top of a milkcrate, aimed the thing at my feet (which were about a foot away, covered in every blanket I owned, all both of them), then went to sleep. To this day, I'm not sure how I managed to not burn the house down with this invention.