Just When You Think You’re Prepared for Mother Nature!

I (a girl raised in arguably the coldest of the prairie provinces--SK and MB may tie!--but it's a dry cold) was never so cold as I was the winter of the year I spent as an exchange student living just outside of Melbourne!  I even had my mom mail me my ski jacket!!

The problem I had was that the buildings in Victoria weren't insulated like at home, and there wasn't central heating, plus winter was very wet/rainy.  I spent every class sitting right up at the front of the room beside the wall heater, and barely moved from the lounge room fire at home.  My host family even had to buy me an electric blanket for my bed    I had lots of people ask me how a girl from Canada could find Australia so cold ...

Last night, it was -40something C here, and life has gone on fairly close to normal.  We have a forced air furnace/central heating in our house, which also is the source for our central air conditioning/cooling in the summer.  The air is moved through metal ductwork and comes out of small metal vents (sometimes called 'registers' if you're old and where I'm from, lol!), at least one in every room of the house, often 2-4 in larger rooms like our family room.  All of our walls are insulated, our windows are at least double paned and manufactured to resist heat transfer, the attached garage at my house has its own natural gas heater so my car lives in a space that doesn't get colder than about +10-15'C, and my husband's shop/office has a giant heater so it's warm out there, too.  Space heaters aren't really a thing, unless you can get away with one at your workplace--some won't allow them because they draw a lot of power and blow fuses, and are potential fire hazards.  I do have two big stone woodburning fireplaces in my house, but they are mostly for looks and for using at Christmas--they warm up the room they're in, but then the thermostat for the furnace thinks the whole house is that warm and the furnace won't run as much and the other rooms can get pretty chilly!  The scariest thing about my furnace is how much it costs to run it