I grew up in the coldest house in my latitude. It was an old schoolhouse originally built in 1904. I took a picture of it on my way through Ohio at Thanksgiving.
Huge, impossible to heat, built before there was insulation. The inside bricks were the same as the outside bricks. I could often see my breath as I went to sleep. It was absolutely the coldest thing to slip your legs into at night. Often when I'd wake up in the morning during the winter ice would have formed on my goldfish bowl in the morning. I'm not kidding at all. And then after I'd spent 8 hours of sleep getting the bed to just the right body temperatrue I'd have to get up and walk around this cold-ass house to get ready for school which I dreaded as well. There was one heating vent, a giant Jabba's Palace-like iron grate in the center of the house that spewed out petroleum smelling heat. I spent a lot of time just laying on that.
Ohio being too cold, I moved to Chicago. So in 33 years I never went to bed in the winter without freezing my ass off for the first half-hour of being in bed. It's always been unbearable. Until this last Christmas in which I was the recipient of the best Christmas gift ever, an electric blanket. Holy shit. What an amazing invention, what I wouldn't give to go back in time and have one of these at the schoolhouse. Every night I slip into the warmest goddamn bed in the history of mankind. It's amazing, it's like cheating, like you shouldn't be allowed to do it. It's beyond my life's lexicon that there can be such an experience of being warm the moment I get into bed. Everytime I go to bed now is a major event. I may never quite get used to it and may always think the government will show up to take it away.
I know it's been unusually warm since Christmas, but I still turn it on every night and may do it all summer.
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