va'esse deireádh aep eigean, va'esse eigh faidh'ar

January was a bit of a bumpy month for us. Work was fine for me - although I would like to know if I am or am not receiving this grant when they were supposed to get back to applicants several weeks ago - but Z was still battling his vertigo for the first half. The PT thinks he got hit by a sort of perfect storm of things to mess with his balance: his ear crystals probably went out of position, on top of his having recently had surgery that changed how air flows through his face (for the better!), and postural issues that exacerbate balance issues, and an existing sensitivity that also makes him motion sick very easily. Thankfully, he started doing much better, and this week is his last doing the vestibular PT.

Then, like a lot of other people, we got hit by the intense cold, and probably like a lot of other people, we discovered that our house was under-insulated. It was one of those things on the house improvement to-do list, but other things had taken a priority, and then it was freezing cold outside and our poor heat pump was struggling to keep up, and we were looking up our area's recommended R-values and looking at our basement and going, oh. There were several days in there that the house did not get above 60F/15C. On the plus side, given how much oil we went through in one month of much milder weather before the heat pump, the increase in our electric bill is nothing like what the oil would have cost us. The worst day was one when we happened to get hit by a very localized outage for six hours in the middle of the night - the house had fallen to nearly 40/4 degrees by the time they were able to get the power back on. We did okay on the whole, I think, but it wasn't the most pleasant week.

The bigger issue is that we were having problems with one of our pipes freezing. We have a drive-in basement, and the pipe goes directly above the door. It froze a couple of times even when we left it dripping, and then it sprung a small leak. Since that part of the ceiling is hard to access, we opted to call a plumber, who also stuffed some more insulation around it. It promptly froze again the next night. We were planning to try to call an insulation specialist - there's a state program to help pay for insulation projects we hope to take advantage of at some point - but weren't feeling great about our odds of getting someone in soon given how out of stock insulation is everywhere. Then while I was standing on a stepstool defrosting the stupid pipe, I looked at the big gap between the door and the wall that was blasting in cold air and had the thought of, maybe that isn't supposed to be like that? Can it be fixed? Called a company to take a look at it; they had someone out in less than two hours who not only fixed it and almost entirely closed the gap, but did so for free because it turned out they'd installed it and it was under warranty. \o/ Pipe hasn't frozen since, the floor above it is no longer freezing cold, and I imagine sealing that up is helping out the poor heat pump lol.

We also happened to have borrowed an infrared camera from the library the day before the weather turned very cold, so we did what we could to patch up smaller gaps. One of our windows had a lot of leaks around the frame!

I did finish a big writing project this month while huddling with a hot water bottle; Z, now that he was feeling better, finally used up last year's birthday gift of several weeks of guitar lessons at the local music school. And we're about to leave for belated holidays with my parents, where hopefully it will be a little warmer. Hope everyone else going through the NA cold spell is doing alright.