The Zeitgeist

        

Ah, nothing like an old fashioned cast iron monster of a furnace to keep the house warm…

I Need 65° and I Need It Now.

Like many of you, I unfortunately burn oil to heat my home. I’ve got a 50-plus year-old beast of a burner down in my basement which probably emerged from the foundry at the same time as the boilers for the Titanic (which is also probably why it continues to chug along year after year, what with it being made from solid steel and not plastic). Come what may with the outside temperature or occasional puddles down in the nether reaches of my basement this burner keeps cranking out the heat and hot water, sending surges of old fashioned scalding hot steam to my 1920-vintage cast iron radiators.

Now when this steam engine was initially installed, I bet that home heating oil was five cents a gallon. Maybe they were even giving it away. Right now however, on the last bill from my dependable oil people, I see that the charge per gallon has risen to $3.94 and at 127 gallons came to over $500.  We have a story in this week’s issue about the ever escalating expense of oil and gasoline but you don’t need that to tell you that the cost of warmth and mobility are reaching new challenges to household cash flow management.

Yeah, I hear all the time about natural gas. The thing is, to remove the existing burner and put in new stuff costs something like $5,000 along with having legions of plumbers wreak havoc on my basement for a week. It would probably take three years for the natural gas savings (on years when there are savings versus oil) to pay for it all. The other issue for me is a deep set paranoia about being the one house in the Five Towns that gets blown to smithereens by a gas leak explosion (you see these all the time on TV, don’t tell me they don’t happen every year) with my being catapulted to kingdom come in the middle of the night courtesy of National Grid. Rational? Hardly. The real solution here to my heating angst is for the weather to finally climb north of 60 degrees for a sustained period and preferably above 65 so that heat becomes irrelevant.

The daffodils, crocuses and tulip tips peaking out from the now thawing ground are harbingers and teases of the balmy temperatures on the horizon. These past two winters here have been a real throwback to the winters of my youth in the 60s and 70s – real, deep cold combined with a lot of snow and ice. Unrelenting and unremitting. I’d like to send the bill for “global warming” over to Al Gore. Maybe he’d like to fill my oil tank. Having spent a week in Florida in February and blissfully missing one of our big storms has made me ponder just how much our area would be paradise if only we had an median temperature of 70.

Thankfully, we’re in the 50s most days now, which means the scarves and gloves are back in the closet, we’re wearing lighter coats, and come next week with the first day of Spring, the banishment of my corduroy pants to the back of the closet until next November. I love cords and the preppy-tweedy look and am excited to don them around Thanksgiving time but I have a rigidly inflexible fashion policy of no cords after March 21^st and no whites after September 22^nd. So, I’m hoping that with the cords put away, the flowers will yet reemerge and we’ll see 65 degrees which I need now not only to stop supporting Big Oil (and the hedge fund/commodity speculators) but also to sit on the porch, warm my bones and get more natural Vitamin D into the bloodstream.