Sweating Your Gut Off

Recently I mocked Morons and their thermostat habits - freezing up north, and AC'ing it too much in the south.

In fact one Floridian jabroni confessed to me that his heat goes on at 72 degrees!

One thing I can't stand is the way everyone down here blasts their air conditioner at all times. The worst offenders are, of course, bars and restaurants! (The waitstaff is hot from running around....so to arctic hell with the customers, apparently.)

It's so effin' cold in these eateries. Tonight at Pincher's I demanded a seat in the warmer climes of outside, far away from the darn AC.

There's no way that all this *conditioned air* is healthy, right?

I was sure it was right and one Google revealed that, yes, air conditioning at least make people FAT.

You see heat is a natural appetite suppressant....

So you do the math.

Of course AC also makes people *sicker* from germs and whatnot too.

Cold, Stubborn, and Cheap!

My father informed me that last week another record was set in his bedroom...

He said the thermostat hit a mind- and body-numbing 37 degrees in the wee hours of the morning!

Why? Because he and my other alleged biological parent *like it cold*.

Now this isn't the North Pole; it's Massachusetts. And it's not 1800, it's the year 2013.

They started out young and cheap, which is fine.

But as they got older and wealthier, the *no heat* thing went from being a point of pragmatic cheapness to one of obstinacy. Hence now they *like it cold*.

This subject is always a fun conversation starter. Out with a group of earthlings....ask everyone what they set the thermostat at - in the summer and in the winter.

Not for nuthin', but most people are friggin' profligate wimps. They put the heat on to 70 at night.

We do 60 degrees at night and I haven't met anyone in my (wealthy?) social circles who does likewise. The lowest I've heard is 65.

Oh, and the Florida Morons are hilarious too...how they put the heat on at 65!

Man up, y'all.

Marginalizing The Oceanfront Home

First, I must update y'all on our friend, the local speculator. He's dropped his listing price twice since our last update to $749,000. Remember 800k was his *breakeven*.

Last week I met a guy at church whose house was oceanfront. He told me the winter is BRUTAL - that his toilet shakes all winter long from the howling wind. Meanwhile, if he walks 50 yards away, out of the direct line of the water, the wind is practically non-existent.

The thing is, on the South Shore of Boston, oceanfront homes face NORTH.

We were driving down Jerusalem road yesterday - near the home pictured above which, coincidentally, is currently listed for $2.5 million - and came across a *moving sale*. This was a rather large place; it had to have sold for around $3 million smackeroos I'm guessing. I asked the re-locating owner, "Where in Florida are you moving to?" He laughed. He was moving inland just a bit, in fact only a couple of miles away, where "...the heating bills are a lot lower."

The more evidence I gather, the more I am concluding that oceanfront homes in my hood are complete jam-jobs. The summer is too short; maintenance from salt-air erosion is incessant; AND homeowners freeze to death in the winter. It doesn't well matter how high you jack the thermostat up when that northerly breeze is bearing down on you, 24 hours a day, for six months straight, every year.

And just wait, one year heat will finally get expensive!

Northeast Housing - Bailed Out Again

For each of the last three years I have been in Boston, rising oil prices have threatened disaster for winter heating bills.

Yet each year, homeowners were bailed out. Both the '04-'05 and '05-'06 winters were extraordinarily mild and both times oil cratered in price. Last year wasn't particularly cold either but oil managed to stay upwards of $90-$100 - providing a whiff of heating bill fear up here for the second half of the six-month winter. But sheeple need more than a *one-time* whiff to panic - or to even change consumptive behavior.

Today, crude oil is trading around $57-$58 per barrel so the winter - thus far - looks like heat bills won't be that painful. However, this summer, oil was almost triple that level. It's a good thing New Englanders are economically illiterate as they might have collectively pooped their trousers if they imputed heat bills from $148 oil of this past July.

Though many did panic, including one of my know-it-all uncles who locked in at $3.85 per gallon of heating oil. Today, retail quotes are already down to $2.35 and should drop further.



Also, while oil might have been running a bit last year, natural gas remained tame. They say that natural gas heat bills were 35% less than heating oil bills. That gap should be much narrowed this year. It might even flip back to *even*.

As I type this, my neighbor is getting a gas line run through his front yard. So, like my uncle, he too got whip-sawed. Ideally, one should have BOTH gas and oil heating capabilities built into their house.

How does this effect housing? Well, obviously heat can be a large living expense up here. New England is full of 'old coots' on fixed incomes - people who complain about every 50 cent increase in their cable bills. These people should rightfully be in Florida or the Carolinas already. High heating bills might just nudge them there - and that'll be yet another blow to this still overpriced housing market.



Yeah, 'old coots' and 'old bags' are CHEAP, but they are also stubborn. My parents who live in Worcester, MA haven't even turned their heat on yet. When people talk about inflation and how it reduces *standards of living*....they are no doubt talking about trying to sleep in my parents' igloo. (Temps have already been down to the low 30s at night.)

My real estate buddy in Naples, Florida keeps praying for a cold, high-cost-of-oil (and gas) winter in the Northeast. He'd certainly have sold more homes over the past three years if the weather and commodity price fluctuations weren't conspiring to prop up Northeastern home prices.

First, Do No Harm...

Last Wednesday, the heat in our master bedroom stopped working. On the cusp of December here in New England, it is cold. A quick glance at the forecast showed that by Saturday, we would see a high of 32 and low of 15 degrees, aggravated by strong winds.

Now, being the stand-up, self-reliant MAN that I am, I didn't want to bother my landlord. My bedroom represents only one of the four heat zones. My kitchen, living room, and most importantly, the kids' bedrooms upstairs all had heat. The heat has been occasionally fickle so I figured there was a good chance it may pop back on any minute. So why bother my landlord and a plumber? You should only molest him for the BIG stuff.

However, pesty experience reminded me, that if our overall heat got worse, that there'd be no way any plumber would be available this upcoming freezing weekend.

So, two days passed and my bedroom was still an igloo. Friday afternoon I alerted my landlord. He came and checked it out while we hit Outback Steakhouse. He couldn't get it going.

Saturday arrives and it is FREEZING - just as forecast. My landlord comes over at 6pm to try and "fix" the heat. An hour later, he leaves. I tell him, it's okay. we have a space heater. We'll be fine...yadda yadda yadda (read "get out of my house please" and "if anything, please call a plumber"). So he does eventually get a hold of a plumber who plans on showing up at 8am the next morning. Great. We go to church at 8:30am and plumbers are even less punctual than the cable guys.

My landlord leaves. Soon after he's gone, I realize that his attempted "fixing" has knocked out two more of the heat zones. Now only my kids' bedrooms upstairs have heat.

Here, I paused and fumed and contemplated. All I wanted to to do was alert my landlord to the situation - namely that my heat was fading fast. So I text-messaged him. Maybe he could get the plumber to come that night or, minimally, my case would at least be given more urgency in the AM?

Unfortunately, my landlord fashions himself an auto-didactic plumber and went to Home Depot. He bought some new digital thermostats and a new "regulator" or ("circulator"). Now mind you, plumbing is no amateur hobby. I got very nervous when my dogged landlord showed back up at my house at 8pm.

He's here for an hour and a half. Borrowing my tools, keeping my kids awake, traipsing dirt on the floors I just mopped. I preemptively told him I wanted to be in bed at 8:30. Here's what followed:

Tactfully, I pleaded with him to not do anything. Don't try to change a regulator; leave the thermostats alone; etc. It was to no avail.



He pulls my bedroom thermostat off the wall, unhooks the wires and reattaches them to a new one he purchased at Home Depot. "Can't you get electrocuted doing stuff like this?", I wondered while I kept my distance.

He goes to the corner of the room to inspect the radiator and hollers to me, "Hey, do you know you have cold air coming out of your vents...you got to close these".

Say what?

Now its screaming windy out. So whatever draft he felt from the floor vents I assumed was coming somehow from outside. Then I noticed cold air coming out of another vent. I looked at my landlord and bellowed:

CaptiousNut - Yo, you turned the air conditioning on. You must have the wires attached wrong!!!

Though immediately in denial, after a minute he realized something about his installation was awry. He unplugs the thermostat and switches the wires without effect. Cold air is still streaming from my formidable central AC unit into my already frigid bedroom.

My artless landlord then removes the thermostat completely but even that didn't terminate the air conditioning. I let this clown monkey around for another twenty minutes before I handed him a flashlight and demanded he go outside and manually turn off the AC unit.

Now it was 9:30pm. I made him leave. Later that night, even my kids' heat stopped working.

Shouldn't there be a Hippocratic oath for penny-pinching landlords?

First, do no harm...

A credit check just isn't sufficient vetting.

Aside from the annoyance of my amateur landlord, the erratic to non-existent heat has been no big deal.

I just remind myself that we have soldiers carrying 90-pound backpacks in the Iraqi desert.