Thoughts on Heating

Plum has been taking his insulin shots with great success and has grown slightly indifferent to my presence, so I thought I'd make him remember what it is he'll be missing when I head back to Ireland. I decided to move a little further west for a week and visit my pals in Kansas City. I forgot how cold KC can be...really mind-numbingly, skin-crackingly cold. Even colder than a house with an ill-functioning furnace (sorry Brad!)

My flight found me crammed between an older, larger couple bookending me between window and aisle. I managed to get the middle seat (or the 'hump' seat in car parlance) with no chance for relocation as the flight was full up. I wore my huge puffy orange coat the whole time and sweated it out, just to torture myself even more. I arrived to gray skies and that dry wispy kind of snow blowing over the plains.

After an evening of watching old Looney Toones on 16mm projected onto a cleverly constructed wall screen, I awoke this morning on one of the most comfortable couches I've ever lost consciousness on. My skin is like brittle newspaper and my hands no longer seem to be mine, but instead those of a 98-year-old arthritic with a lifetime of deep-frying french fries behind her. Dry, so very dry.

While I often bemoan the disappearance of good old-fashioned central heat provided by loud clanking radiators, Kansas City has, for the most part, stuck to it. The heat is equal to that of a volcanic explosion (woe be unto him who mistankenly lays his hand on a hot, cast iron radiator...Ouch!) and many's the fond memory I have of opening windows in the middle of a snowstorm because, by gum, that heat was just so darned hot. Sadly, that great pretender to the heating throne, the useless 'heat pump', is winning hearts and minds with promises of great financial savings, but really, is it such a savings if tepid air is lamely blown around from ceiling vents? If elementary school science classes taught me anything, it was that hot air rises, and this basic lesson still holds true.

However, while there is all that terrific hot hot heat in which to rejoice, there is the dry dry air. My first nose bleed came from the inaugural winter in my $350/month studio on 14th and Clay in Portland. I awoke one morning to find my pillow case doused in blood. Since my head was still attached to my body, leading me to believe I hadn't been murdered in the night, I deduced nose bleed. The heat was cranked up, but the moisture in the air had been annihilated.

So, after spending less than 24 hours in Kansas City, my home for four years, more or less, I am obsessed with its superior heating. The sun is shining today and the snow melting away. I will go out and greet old friends, see old haunts, eat favorite foods and think of other, greater things, aside from heating.