wherein Liz attempts some DIY home insulation (also, a brief smoke shop update)

Today was my day off (yes, singular) for this week, and I took the opportunity to catch up on some sleep. Twelve hours straight. Holy shit, I needed that.

Then I did laundry, did the grocery run, repotted a new houseplant (which I purchased on Friday as a sorely needed cheer-up gift to myself), and gave the weatherizing plastic sheet treatment to my other living room window.

The day started sunny and merely chilly -- temperature in the upper thirties -- but the erratic gusts of wind got stronger all afternoon, the temperature fell, and around 2:30pm we began to get snow flurries. Nothing has stuck as yet down in the lake valley, but there was some minor accumulation at Tops by the mall (which is, of course, on top of a hill) and there is a potential for up to 2 inches accumulation over the course of Sunday. I expect a dusting at best, but who really knows.

Anyway, the reason I have stuck plastic sheeting over my two living room windows is because they are single-pane, and non-insulated, and generally just old. They rattle in their frames (would do so constantly if not for the folded paper wedges I have employed to stabilize them) and if I stand on a chair to raise my hand high enough, I can feel frigid air seeping in through the cracks between the lower and upper panels. (If the wind is strong enough, you can see it as the rolls of paper towel I stuffed in there years ago as makeshift insulation flutter in the draft.) I had to wipe the windows down with rags twice during the plastic installation, since they kept gathering condensation and I didn't feel like trapping a waterfall out of my reach.

I need to remember to call Landlord Dude and ask him to install the storm window over my porch/foyer window. This will involve negotiating a time when Downstairs Neighbor S has her car out of the garage, since the storm window is in the basement, which is only accessible through the garage, and the window is so huge and unwieldy that it physically cannot get through the doorway unless the garage is empty. But I want that window badly.

I am not weatherizing the windows in my computer room, my bedroom, or my kitchen, because I open them in the spring and fall (and in the case of my bedroom, I don't want to figure out how to make the plastic play nice with the Venetian blind). I have used some tape and judicious force to wedge little strips of insulation foam into and over the gaps where the bottom panels join the top panels, because every little bit of draft reduction helps.

I think it is working, incidentally! I have not yet had a night where I had to curl into a fetal ball for up to two hours before and after falling asleep because any other position resulted in ice cube feet. (And this after I wear bedsocks and put a fleece throw on top of my nice thick comforter, eesh.) Since I haven't been doing anything different with my thermostat, and I have definitely had ice cube feet nights in prior Novembers, I'm inclined to thank my insulation efforts.

I suppose it's possible that Landlord Dude's furnace recalibration shares the credit -- that being the adjustment that also managed to knock out ALL heat to both downstairs apartments until Downstairs Neighbor S browbeat Landlord Dude into fixing whatever he broke last spring -- but if nothing else, I am sure my houseplants are happier for the weatherizing. They are the ones who live in constant close proximity to those windows, after all. :-)

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In smoke shop news, Boss Lady has decided that Lemme-Tell-Ya cannot come back to work until and unless he provides a doctor's note certifying that he can work with no restrictions, that is acceptable to our parent company's legal scrutiny. This is not likely to happen soon, if at all. He is off the schedule for the coming week and we will see what happens from there.

I will briefly overlap shifts with Boss Lady on Sunday and I guess we'll talk about that situation then, among many other things. I wish this mess hadn't exploded while I was in charge, but I think something would have happened sooner or later. Boss Lady's presence inhibited some of the worst flare-ups, if only because nobody wants to act like a jerk in front of the manager, but Sweetheart and Melodrama have been getting progressively more stressed out over the past several months, and we have collectively worried about Lemme-Tell-Ya's health and his coping methods a lot more this past year than previously, so... yeah. Something had to give, and this week was the breaking point.

I really hope we get a couple new hires soon.

Also, I want a raise. We all deserve raises. That would be a really nice holiday gift.