I don’t know about you guys, but where I come from, we have heating and cooling units in every room. Oh… Don’t get your hopes up–it’s just a window.

Too hot? Open the window. Too cold? Close it! I guess if you want a bit of both, you could have it open half-way, but that only leaves three settings: hot, cold, or eh…

In beautiful Kula, Maui, you leave your window open just a crack through the night to let in the cool mountain air, and you wake up in the morning shivering in your bunny slippers saying, “Oh my gosh! Turn the damn heater on!!!” So you close the window, make your breakfast, start sipping on scalding hot coffee, and then you say, “Oh my gosh! It’s too damn hot! AC! AC!” You open the window again, go about your daily routine, and then 5pm comes… The Hour of Doom. The sun pounds down on the roof, there’s not a trade wind to be found, and you are dying. Open all the windows, open all the doors, crank those fans on high, and enjoy an iced coffee instead. And by the time you’re ready for bed, you’re thinking, “Holy crap! How can it be this hot!?” But by morning…

The interesting thing about this whole situation is that in Hawaii, temperatures range from about 50-90 on a fluctuating day… Still relatively hot, right? Oh… you haven’t lived there like I have…

Enter Lacey, Washington. We too have heaters in every room, and this time, it’s a REAL heater! …And we also have windows, in case anyone’s wondering…

And while we’re at it… Enter Katie. Who, for the first month of last year, was afraid of the heater and refused to use it no matter how cold it got. Yeah, laugh all you want–I survived…

I’m not kidding either– I would pile my blankets on top of myself, dress in layer upon layer of clothes, and shiver my little toesies off until one day I finally broke down and turned the heater on… in order to dry some clothes that couldn’t go in the dryer… I ran my clothes up to my room, cranked the heater up to 80, and when I brought the rest of my laundry up to fold, my room was nice and toasty. So toasty that I had to open the window to even it out.

Needless to say, I never really figured out how to use my heater until second semester, and I still left my window open just a crack, no matter how cold it got. Oh it’s a wonder how I’ve made it this far without freezing to death.

This year, though. It’s going to be different! I’m naming my heater, something cute and fluffy, like Bubbles or Mocha or something so it seems less threatening. And I’m not going to wait until it snows to turn it on. This time, I’ve got my desk set up right next to the heater, and one cold morning when I was studying, I let Bubbles do his magic from the cool temperature of 70 degrees. I still kept my blanket (after all, I am used to 90),  but I was nice and warm without feeling like a lobster cooking in a pot.

That’s right, after one year of education, I have mastered the heater! Took me long enough…