Heat.

When I woke up this morning the temperature was 37 degrees Fahrenheit.  That was actually the low.  Apparently my house reaches a sort of stasis point and hovers at 38 degrees.  I'm guessing it had something to do with the sun coming through the windows during the day, because it was colder outside so there isn't another apparent reason for it to bounce back up a degree, much less stay there for an extended period.

I've spent most of the day curled up under a blanket in one room or another trying to keep my extremities from getting too cold.

Before I could do that I had to go out and shovel again since the storm yesterday continued into the night plows came by as they are wont to do, and if I hadn't spent a lot of time shoveling I wouldn't have been able to get my oil.

After the shoveling I spent most of the morning trying to conserve heat and begging the universe in general to send the oil truck as soon as possible.

At around 11 I decided to walk to a nearby Dunkin' Donuts not because I particularly wanted doughnuts (though I gladly accept them when offered, except for the cream ones) but because I knew it would have heat so if I got a dougnut or two there I could use their heat to warm up a bit.

It seemed to go well, but eventually (back home, curled up, wishing for heat) I realized that my toes were getting unconscionably cold and finally realized that the walk had left me with wet socks which I hadn't taken off on account of not noticing that they got wet.

So, that happened.

Finally the oil came.  After going through the steps involved in restarting a furnace that's run completely out of oil, I had the wondrous sound of a precious natural resource being lit on fire, and my house, presumably, began the process of heating up.

To heat myself up I find that a warm shower does wonders.  Which is when I found out I had no cold water.  With the furnace running I had scalding hot water, but with no cold water to throw into the mix it was useless, perhaps even dangerous.  (Certainly would have been painful if I'd tried to shower in it.)

The good news is that no pipes seem to have burst, but I'm guessing one must have frozen.  It has since thawed, no flood.

I have had my shower, the house is gradually returning to a state of not-cold-as-fuck, and $520.26 as been charged to my account.

The good news beyond the heat itself relates to those bills I absolutely needed to pay at the beginning of this month.  It ended up that the simplest way to pay part of that was extremely round about.  Another member of my family would pay that part for me and for them I would pay for the heating for yet a third party in the family at which point ... it turned out that heating assistance came through for the third party so their bill was paid for.*

Which means that member of my family two (I'm member of my family one) was off the hook for paying for heating oil for member of my family three and thus could cover that part of the need-to-be-paid-now bills without me actually paying for heating oil for member of my family three.

So using the money to pay for heating oil for me does not leave me wondering how one goes about filing for bankruptcy and looking up the local homeless shelters.

Of course that simply kicks things down the road a bit since I still need to pay member of my family 2, but family members can be a bit more flexible about payment dates than outside sources.

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* I think this is the part where I say, "Isn't accounting fun?" or something to that effect.