The outdoor part of the heat pump started making an alarming rattle; since it’s freezing rain season, sanguinity thinks it has ice built up inside somewhere. Therefore, we are now running the A/C full blast to push warm air from the living room out past the mechanism and hopefully melt the ice. Then if it works we can heat the house again, maybe.

I have turned on the electric blanket in case it’s an early bedtime instead.

Inappropriate heating and cooling seems to be a bit of a theme in our life: rolling up the windows and blasting the car heater in the summer for “car sauna” to acclimate for Badwater, rolling down the windows and blasting the car heater that Christmas the dog rolled in dead fish and we couldn’t stand to be enclosed with him, and de-smoking the house that time during the Snowpocalypse when the exercise ball caught on fire on the old furnace grate.

The heat pump controls for air conditioning go down to 64 degrees. Economically sensible, but inadequate for certain experiments or, say, a Mr. Popper’s Penguins scenario. Fortunately, you can hit a button with a little picture of a strongman flexing his bicep, and the heat pump gives it all it’s got for 20 minutes. We call him Skookum-Man.