I'm laughing now...

I’m laughing now, but I wasn’t last night.

I walked in the door to my house last night after work, and, as I was changing clothes and getting ready to head back out for a coffee date with friends, I wondered why my house didn’t feel very much warmer inside than the nearly freezing outdoors.

I sort of figured it was that my internal body temperature is still off from being ill all week, but decided to check with my roommate anyway. “Is it me, or is it cold in here?”

She told me it was cold in our house.

I said I was going to turn the thermostat up.

She said that she’d actually turned the furnace off a day or two previously.

I almost lost it at that point.

I have to keep reminding myself that she’s never in her lifetime experienced winter. That she is a New Zealander who spent a huge chunk of her life in West Africa. That snow, and months of temperatures below zero are a foreign concept.

She has a need to conserve energy, which is great, except that we are living in a basement suite in Western Canada, not West Africa. Turning the heater off as winter approaches is not a good method of energy conservation in our living situation.

I told her she can’t turn the furnace off anymore. Things will freeze that shouldn’t – things like water pipes, and, well, me!

It took my brother to make me laugh at this one. He picked me up for the coffee with friends, and I was telling him that J. had turned off our heat. He wanted to know why – I told him it was because she wanted to conserve energy and save money. He cracked up when I commented that we don’t even pay for our heat separately – it’s included in our monthly rent! I started seeing the lighter side of it at that moment. She was curled up on our couch under a blanket when I left, wearing a polar fleece sweater and a scarf, and thought that it was normal!

I’m wondering, now if I was ever fighting with a faulty body thermostat this week, for the three days I’ve spent battling chills, or if it was just simply that my thrifty roommate was saving money on something that costs us nothing!