As I move around my apartment, scrubbing the walls around my windows in preparation for my yearly tradition of covering them in a layer of insulating and draft-blocking plastic, I am struck by how much of my life is taken over by what are essentially coping mechanisms for things beyond my control. I’m also struck by how many bugs have died in the three weeks since I last pulled my carpet back to sweep the half-inch of space between said carpets and my patio door, but that doesn’t really make for an interesting blog post topic. The entire process I’m going through is one meant to mitigate the fact that my apartment complex has absolutely terrible windows that not only leak cold through them like a sieve (thanks largely to their terrible metal frames) but that are so poorly installed or maintained that they don’t even block the wind. It’s much more difficult to detect when the entire frame is uncovered, but putting the plastic over them makes it clear that there’s wind blowing through them almost constantly.
Continue readingWinter
Infrared Isolation: Chapter 9
New to the series or certain you’ve missed a chapter? You can find the introduction Here and the table of contents Here.
Continue readingInfrared Isolation: Chapter 8
New to the series or certain you’ve missed a chapter? You can find the introduction Here and the table of contents Here.
Continue readingThe First Taste of Wisconsin Winter
[Another casual reminder that I write these a week before they go up, since it’s currently summer in Wisconsin again]
It is snowing again today. Over night, the temperatures bottomed out in the high twenties and even hours after dawn, with temerpatures flirting with freezing for hours already, there was still the pale remnants of the morning’s frost on the deep green grass outside my apartment. Flurries of small, damp snowflakes fill the air like mist and dampen the world as the trees drip what remains of the snow that landed on them from their brightly colored leaves. I am bundled up against the wind and chill, my layers quickly dug out of the closet when it became clear that my usual fall garb would be insufficient for the day, and still I briefly consider turning around for a heavier coat. I walk along the sidewalk, tracing the same old path from my front door to my car, but far more attentively than in past months for fear of slipping on the ice that stretches across the sidewalk. Today, I miss the comfort of holding a warm mug in my hand as my new coffee cup prevents any heat from escaping it but I am grateful that my coffee will still be warm throughout my entire drive to work on this blustery, snowy morning.
Continue readingInfrared Isolation: Chapter 7
New to the series or certain you’ve missed a chapter? You can find the introduction Here and the table of contents Here.
Continue readingWinter Is Coming, Weather I Like It Or Not
It snowed yesterday (here’s my usual reminder that I write these a week ahead of time, so really it was eight days before this posted). It was fairly brief and I only got a bare glimpse of it because I was busy at work. I couldn’t stop to go watch the mixed snow and sleet come down, which was unfortunate, but I did get to see a bunch of people walk down a hallway I can see from my desk and a lot of them were dusted with the stuff. It’s not really the same thing at all, but it was enough for me to know it was snowing and when it eventually stopped. It was a weird occurrence, given that there hadn’t even been rain on the forecast when I went in to work that morning, and weirder still when you consider that we had a 24-hour period that hit the mid-sixties at the lowest just two days prior. Sure, it was above freezing so the snow didn’t stick around upon landing on the ground, but it was still weird to get our first snow in mid October. I mean, just recently I was thinking about how weird it’d be if we got our first snow before Halloween again and here we are, more than half a month beforehand. Now we’ve got a span of days sitting around freezing before we pop back into the sixties and maybe even seventies in about a week. Absolutely normal weather, for sure.
Continue readingInfrared Isolation: Chapter 6
New to the series or certain you’ve missed a chapter? You can find the introduction Here and the table of contents Here.
Continue readingInfrared Isolation: Chapter 5
New to the series or certain you’ve missed a chapter? You can find the introduction Here and the table of contents Here.
Continue readingInfrared Isolation: Chapter 4
New to the series or certain you’ve missed a chapter? You can find the introduction Here and the table of contents Here.
Continue readingInfrared Isolation: Chapter 3
New to the series or certain you’ve missed a chapter? You can find the introduction Here and the table of contents Here.
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