All About Braving The Cold

It was 35 degrees, according to the news that I put on the TV at about 7 in the morning.

I had woken up and done the Wim Hof breathing exercises, but only after having had a cup of coffee. Wim drinks coffee in the morning, but does his breathing first.

Then, he gets into a tub of ice water and goes into deep meditation to regulate his body temperature manually, I think. I'll have to watch a few more of his videos.

The fact that the hot water went out in our building for about 4 days last week, I took as one of those fortuitous coincidences that befall the practitioners of The Law of Attraction. Before I went up to the lobby to complain and inquire about the water, I had decided to watch the rest of a Wim Hof video that I had paused; and the very next thing he recommended was that, people who didn't have large tubs full of ice, could take cold showers.

The idea behind the ice baths was simply stated by some qualified medical guy with his own videos about Wim's videos by pointing out that, upon jumping into an icy body of water, the person's entire focus becomes upon gasping for air; and all the petty concerns and anxieties, such as "did I put food in my dog's dish before I left home" suddenly disappear.

Right now, I have my fan sitting on the counter next to the stove which has each of its burners turned to about the level of 3 out of 10, and the fan is blowing the air off the stove and into the rest of the apartment.

I was able to make it all the way through last winter that way, since there was really only about a month at most that I had to do that. The maintenance people never made it here to look at my heating and air unit, that year.

I put in a work order a couple weeks ago to have it looked at again. I suppose if I told Missy the building manager that I was using my stove and a fan to heat the place, the heating and air guy might appear. I used to have the schematics for the thing, as they had been left behind by someone at one point; but I would have needed at least a volt-o-meter with an ammeter and probably a soldering rig in order to have fixed it myself.

At least if the fan were to fall backwards and land on the stove and start to burn, the smoke alarms wouldn't go off; I ripped all of them out of their sockets because they were way too sensitive, and would go off if I left a pan of rice on the stove too long and it started smoking.

Where There's Smoke, There's Ire

That would require the fire department to show up, as per their regulations, which was a pain in the neck for all parties involved. One such time the firemen reported that I had "fallen asleep" with something on the stove; when actually I had been in the other room and had heard the sound of the water boiling out of the rice, but by the time I made it to the pan, the stuff on the bottom had begun to smoke; and that had been enough to set the alarms off. And enough to get me written up for a violation of my lease, under the false accusation of having fallen asleep. I think because the firemen saw wine bottles in the apartment, they made that assumption.

A plastic fan would make a hell of a lot of smoke and would burn pretty hot for a long time. Definitely enough to set the wooden cabinets above them on fire. Still, smoke inhalation would be the real danger. But that's why I run the fan on its lowest setting and brace the back of it against one of those cabinets. 

I learned about burning plastics when I was homeless in St. Augustine and there was a crazy guy who had a campsite near me who would throw huge plastic pallets on his bonfire during the winter, when temperatures might have dropped to around freezing. His fires eventually dried the leaves in the canopy of trees about 30 feet above his pit out enough that one night he set "the whole woods" on fire. The nearby Winn Dixie eventually calculated that they were losing a lot of money from plastic pallets being stolen.

I'm about to make a chilly ride up to the local Winn Dixie for water and juice, I believe. Although I could do my guitar practicing first...