It isn't Hardship till You Know What's Missing

For me, the next few days are fearsome.

My house has an inadequate heating system. Tomorrow will be in the 60s.

But tomorrow night, the temperature plummets to the teens.
I am semi-prepared.

We had a harder, longer coldspell in 2013.  My heat ran 24/7 and still kept the house at only 50 degrees. I have bought a space heater, a good one, and hope it will help.


My dogs are Corgis. They have an undercoat. They will love it. Me, not so much.

Yes, yes, I've had it all looked at. I own this home, as of a few years ago. Updating costs more than I want. I don't want the electric bill, but it is only one month.

This month. December.

Sigh.

This hasn't happened in 3 years. I now have a space heater, which I didn't then. The cold spell will be a test of my new system.

We Americans. We wimp too much.

At my age, I can remember going to bed with a hot water bottle too hot to touch with my feet and not daring to move, because the next morning, if I moved my feet, the sheets were icy, with 3-4-5 blankets weighing me down.

But I hadn't known any better then.

We can live in hardship every day and smile and laugh and live.

It isn't hardship until something we didn't want to lose goes missing.

Then it is really hardship.