The Heat is OFF!

With no roommate at the moment, I've been looking for ways to cut expenses. This led to a brilliant plan to keep my natural gas bill down by turning the furnace completely off for the winter. After all, I don't run my AC in the summer, so the opposite only makes sense.

There is just one problem with cutting off the furnace... my apartment gets COLD!

Yes, I live in southern California, but before you spam me with hate mail, keep in mind that it gets pretty cold at night in the desert. Sometimes darn near freezing. And without a lot of sunlight to warm the place up, my bedtime pj's often consist of ski pants, wool socks, and a hoodie.

There are, however, some positive benefits to this budget buster... The morning after the recent absinthe party, for example, I awakened to find I'd lazily left the party's finger foods out overnight in the living room uncovered. Amazingly, everything was refrigerator fresh. Veggies for dipping were still crisp and none of the dips had skin on the top! Needless to say, this brought on a wonderful breakfast, as well as the realization my FTD centerpiece seemed to be as fresh as the day it was bought, some four and a half weeks ago.


As the colder, damper part of the year progresses, I'm discovering cheap and more ingenious ways to keep warm. Tealight candles, for example, are an inexpensive way to take the chill out of the air (though I really need to be more careful with where I toss a used Kleenex -- that or else take the battery out of the smoke alarm again). A single stick of incense is also great for warming the hands while surfing the web. It certainly beats typing in mittens, which I don't recommend.

It's only December, so my new life without heat has really just begun. But I'm already starting to wonder about some of these other bills. Imagine how much I could save by turning off the electricity. I mean, all we really need is the internet connection, right?