It Is Just An Expensive Cardboard Box

6:00 am I am woken up by my daughter, who has been woken up by the familiar beep-beep noise of the oil delivery truck backing up our driveway. Familiar because he is here every week.

The sub zero temperatures are causing us to burn through oil like... like... well, like something you burn through quickly. I can't think of an appropriate metaphor. My brain is numb from cold, lack of sleep, and weak coffee (totally my own fault).

I would say water, but that wouldn't be accurate since half of our pipes are frozen. Maybe I should say money since this is the second week in a row that we have gone through 200 gallons of heating oil.

I might not feel so bad about it if the house were at least warm. I set the thermostat to 70 degrees when I went to bed last night. The temperature in the house at 6:00am was 58 degrees. The furnace simply can not generate enough heat to make up for the heat loss in extreme cold temperatures.

We have a kerosene heater running in our sunroom, the coldest room in our house, to try to take some of the pressure off the furnace. And we have an electric space heater running in one of the bathrooms downstairs where the pipes freeze as soon as the first frost hits the ground. And now,if our bill from last month is any indication, thanks to the new federal deregulation, we are paying about 40% more for our electricity.

I think today I am going to go out and buy more plastic sheeting and duct tape. We have a couple of rooms that we do not use that I have been wanting to turn the heat off to and seal up.

Also it is such a nice look. Nothing says class like plastic duct taped over your windows, especially when the kids tear holes in the plastic and you have to repair the holes with more duct tape. Remind me why we don't have dinner parties?

Soon we are going to be stuffing newspaper inside our clothes and wearing fingerless gloves, while huddling around a fire of our all our wooden furniture. Let the good times roll.

And in case anyone thinks this sounds like fun and wants to come and share the experience with me, the house diagonally across the street from us is for sale. For a measly 1.2 million dollars it can all be yours. Just think about it. It's like living in a cardboard box, but with a really big mortgage. Though I hope for that money it is better insulated than mine.