I've completely lost the ability to regulate my body temperature. I'd always heard that the knees were the first thing to go, but it looks like it's actually the thermostat.
I'm reduced to trying to jump start my temperature in the morning by taking a near-scalding hot shower to raise the temperature up. I don't know how I get so cold by the time I shower when I spend the night sweating, which I do almost every night unless Sweetie has the ceiling fan on, in which case I spend the night both sweating
and freezing, somehow, and dreaming that I'm one of those cars that gets tested in a wind tunnel.
But I do get cold by the time I get to the shower, so I have to try to raise my temperature quickly -- quickly because I'm cold and sluggish and coffee takes some time, and quickly because we have two showers in the house but a hot water heater that really struggles just providing hot water for the dishwasher and isn't quite up to the task of giving two people
warm showers, let alone
hot showers, and my timing is such that I get into the downstairs shower about the time that Middle begins warming up her upstairs shower.
Yes, she warms the shower up. I'm midway through my shower, almost up to a normal 98
degrees body temperature, when Middle starts up the upstairs shower and then, I don't know, goes to watch a couple episodes of "Gossip Girls" on tape or something, while I'm downstairs trying to adjust the shower knob to get me some hot water.
And that's trickier than it sounds. The downstairs shower has a single knob that regulates temperature and water flow. It spins in a complete circle, but I don't know why because 99.9% of the circle is cold water. The remaining 0.1% of territory has the full range of temperature, from ice-cold to peel-your-skin-off-and-make-you-cry. So after I get it adjusted and get in and get my shampoo going, when Middle starts up her own ablutions --
-- "
ablutions" was one of the vocabulary words we worked on last night to get Middle ready for the SAT. I urged her to use it in a sentence today, so I am, too.
Another word was "
abstemious," which means "sparing or moderate in eating or drinking."
Sweetie is abstemious. She is, too -- she mostly lives on ice these days, but not just any old ice. Sweetie likes the gourmet ice that you buy in 7 pound bags at the gas station. She says it tastes different. I'd make fun of that, but I know that location affects taste. Take last night: The Boy was setting the table and he poured the milk. He poured mine in a tiny glass, which I used to ask him to do because I didn't drink milk much, what with it being good for you and all. Plus, I didn't like milk that had been sitting out, and by "sitting out" I mean "removed from the refrigerator for any length of time." My preference would be to go to the grocery store, go back into the walk-in cooler where they keep the milk, and pour myself a glass and drink it right there.
I tried to find an image of a glass of milk but got distracted by the World's Largest Hamburger. That's much like what happens to me at dinner, too.
But I'm changin -- I'm trying to drink more milk, in part because I worry that existing solely on Ranch Puffs, Coke Zero, and Peanut Butter Cap'n Crunch might be taking a toll on my body. So last night, I pointed out to The Boy that I'd changed and had wanted a big glass of milk, and he offered to switch the glass he'd poured for himself with mine. He hadn't drunk out of it or anything, but I had to refuse because it had been sitting on his end of the table and while I want to drink more milk, I don't want to drink milk that was intended for someone else.
So Sweetie gets her ice. And I, as I was saying, get about 2 seconds to re-adjust the shower in the morning when Middle starts hers up, and I have to attempt to precisely locate the exact sliver of space that will allow the shower to divert at least some hot water to me so that I can both finish my
ablutions --
-- nice, huh?--and get that temperature warmed up. That's made even more difficult by the fact that the shower handle sometimes gets loose, so I have to keep a Philips-Head screwdriver
in the shower in case the screw gets loose and I have to fix the shower while standing there with shampoo in my hair and the cold water streaming down on me.
But I go through that because it's the only way to get most of me warm for the rest of the day; it gets me so warm, in fact, that I start sweating before I get dressed for work, and frequently end up at work a little disheveled and itchy (
even if I didn't have to open the garage door.) I only get
most of me warm, though, because my ankles
never get warm.
In retrospect, the ankles were probably the first thing to go and my warning sign of things to come -- ankles are the canaries of the body. And my ankles are also the reason why Sweetie and I haven't seen our friends -- really, our only friends who aren't biologically related to us -- in over a year. (And I can't really count, as friends,
Mr Bunches and Mr F because while I'm pretty sure they like me, they're not much in the way of conversation. They prefer chewing on my shirt and yelling. I haven't had friends like that since college.)
Our only couple friends, who I'll call Trent and Trentina, because "Trent" looks exactly like Trent Dilfer even though he says he doesn't, used to get together with us about 1 or 2 or, sometimes, 3 times a year. We had a whole system worked out: One of us would get in touch with the other and suggest that we get together. We'd pick a day, and then at the last minute, one couple would back out and reschedule for oddly vague reasons. ("The kids are... okay, then, we'll talk to you soon!") Eventually, though, we'd go because the crushing pressure of guilt and social expectations required that we do it, and it was a pretty good time.
(That picture, by the way, is the real Trent Dilfer, not "Trent." But they look the same, so assume it's our friend.)
We also alternated houses: they'd come here, we'd go there. The last time we saw them, we went to visit their new house. It was January or December or something -- something cold. When we got there, they asked us to take off our shoes.
Do you think that's rude? I kind of do. I know, you don't want people tramping around the house in wet shoes, but is it better to have guests all over in their socks or bare feet? I feel weird, in company, standing there in my socks. I'm already socially awkward; do I have to feel like I'm also not-quite-dressed?
Plus, I have this thing about my shoes. I can't stand to have my shoes mis-tied. They can't be tied too tight, and they can't be tied too loose, and most importantly, they can't be tied too
differently. If there's a difference in the tightness between my left and right shoes, it drives me nuts. It takes me three, four tries to get it right. And I can't do that standing in someone's front hall when I leave, so I end up driving home hoping to hit a red light so I can quickly readjust my shoes.
In answer to the most-frequently-asked question I get:
No, I don't know how Sweetie puts up with me.But we took off our shoes and ate some cheese and crackers and watched a movie, and as the night wore on, my feet, and my ankles, got colder and colder.
Actually, all of me got colder and colder, but it started in the feet and moved up; the cold was seeping up through the floor and into my legs, like an evil spirit taking me over. I could
feel it moving up.
Midway through the night, Trent and Trentina explained that one minor, one
slight, one
little problem with their house is that it's set up in an odd fashion, all spread out and L-shaped, and the furnace is on one end of the house and really struggles to heat the whole house, so it gets a
little cold.
They told that to me at the same time as it felt like I was walking on peglegs. Eventually, thankfully, the night ended. And I managed to wedge my shoes onto unfeeling feet and get into the car, where I set the heater on "floor" and blasted it, trying to ignore the inequality in my shoelaces. We drove home and my feet regained feeling, but there was permanent damage to the ankles, I think, because they have been cold ever since.
We've never been back. Trent and Trentina visited us a few months later, after cancelling a few times. It's our turn to go there now, but I'm afraid to, and so I've avoided contacting them because it means that I'll have to go there and I can't guarantee, with the cancellation routine, that it would be during the summer. Given how cold it was that last time, I'm not even sure that their house would be warmer in the summer -- Antarctica has summer, too, but you don't see people going there for a vacation. Maybe their house is just permanently cold, as if that guy from the Rudolph special lived there.
(Did you know that if you mistakenly think that guy was called the "Freeze Meister" and do an image search for it on Google, Google will ask you if you meant "Cold Miser?" How did they know?)
So I'm stuck with this body that can't heat itself right, that never warms up the ankles, and which, once warmed up, never stops sweating until just before I get into the shower the next day. I'm an abject person whose body is an abhorrent aberration.
We only got to the A's last night. Maybe there's some hope for me further along in the alphabet.
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