brrr, it's cold in here

…there must be some Toro's in the atmosphere! Anyone else get that in there head every time someone says it's cold in here/there? Every. Single. Time.

Growing up it was a well known rule that you do NOT touch the thermostat. There might as well have been a lock box around it. My mom got away with it when we were younger, because we were naive and believed that she was always so cold in the summer but it somehow didn't bother her during the winter…riiiiiight. 

Now we know that it was all in an attempt to save money. In the summer, the house was always 78 degrees and who even knows what it was during the winter, I just became used to bundling up under 3 + blankets. When we lived in Lafayette and visited, we would sneak over to the thermostat and lower it, only to wake up and be afraid to face the wrath of my mother. Hi mom! I still love you.

Now that we have our own house, I carried some of her mentality over with me…I was convinced that our electricity bill was going to be out of CONTROL because she's always told me theirs is when we make the slightest change. Add on the fact that we have a three story house and you get anxiety. Or is that just me? Imagine my surprise when our first electricity bill - which was in the month of June in HOUSTON - was only $90.00. Say wha? It is a new house, and my parents is an older home, so maybe that is the difference? Or maybe my dear sweet mother has just been lying to us this whole time!

You may remember back in August (or was it September?) that our air conditioning broke. It wasn't that big of a deal, I moved my office down to the first floor because that A/C still worked, but we needed it fixed because the kitchen is on the second floor and cooking without an A/C in the heat of Houston sounds like a death wish. It could have been worse - it ended up being only $500 - I was bracing myself for $2000. So we paid it and moved on. 

They came back a few weeks ago to install one more part on it and mentioned something about how the heat wasn't working because it was on gas and it needed to be on electricity. Blah blah, in one ear and out the other. It would be a while until we needed heat, right?

Ehhh…wrong. A cold front came through on Monday and A went to turn the heat on…and nothing. But wait! Lightbulb! What did they say about gas/electricity? Switch that! Still nothing? Oh great. 

I have no problems keeping the house cool during the summer (ok, and spring and fall and most of winter, we do live in Houston), but my inner Barb starts screaming during the winter. I will wait as long as I can until I turn that heat on. I would rather sleep with five blankets than turn the heat on - and anyways, it's extremely comfortable to do that!

A, surprise surprise, disagrees with me. 

I wanted to just pile on the blankets and pretend that nothing was wrong with our heater. A apparently did not, because I got a call yesterday that the technician was about to be at our house to take a look at it. Awesome! Goodbye money!

It turned out to not be that bad again, the thermostat was broken and wasn't registering anything when we switched it to heat. So $179 later, we have heat. For the five days that we need it this winter, we will be all right. But now I'm mad that we had to pay $179 for a crappy ugly thermostat when the Nest is only $100 more. It's just so fancy looking! Does anyone have one and love it? Necessary? I mean really, Kaitlyn, how hard is it to turn it on yourself? But it would be so fun to control it from my phone! Technologyyyyyy!