Answer Me This

Another summer Sunday, another round of Answer Me This fun over at Catholic All Year!

1. At what temperature do you keep the thermostat set? Summer, winter, day, night?

I turned the thermostat off in May, and it won't be turned back on until we're getting frost warnings overnight, probably by mid-September. There's no central a/c, so the apartment can get hot... With the unusually miserable combination of hot weather and heavy smoke from forest fires we've been dealing with these past few weeks, we finally gave in and got a portable a/c unit. On days that we can't open doors and windows to cool down, we've been turning it on for a couple of hours to bring the apartment down to 75; nights the bedrooms can get up to 80, hopefully not any warmer.

Last winter we kept the thermostat set to 65 in the bedrooms, 60 in the rest of the apartment. Burning a fire in the morning and evening, or keeping it going all day when it was really cold out, usually kept the living room/kitchen area closer to 75, which is verging on too warm for our taste; you don't have quite the level of ambient temperature control with a fireplace that you do with a thermostat, though! Often, the residual heat from the fireplace would be enough that the heat wouldn't have to kick on all night, and we went days at a time in warmer weather without burning any heating oil.

2. What is your favorite frozen beverage?

A vanilla milkshake, no whipped cream or cherry.

3. Where do you keep your keys?

Usually in Matt's pocket. On days I have the car, they're probably near the door or on the kitchen table.

4. Have you ever really been lost?

Once, when Matt and I were dating, we were heading back to his parents' house from visiting friends in the DC area. Matt was driving, I was navigating—this was before we had phones with GPS capabilities, so I had a full-size laptop open on my lap running a map program to figure out where we were supposed to be going. We got a later start than we'd planned, having taken a detour to drop some other friends off at the metro, and it was already dark. Matt merged onto the beltway, and we started looking for our exit: Exit 200-something, according to the program, and it was coming up in just over a mile. The first exit we saw was Exit 2. They'd renumbered the exits! It took forever to find a way to get turned around and figure out which exit we were supposed to be taking.

5. What is the last movie you saw in the theaters?

The Avengers, the first one. Not a bad movie to have as the last I'll ever see in theater; I have binocular instability, which means that each eye tries to present my brain with an image on its own rather than cooperating to create the image together, so both eyes individually are constantly refocusing. In day-to-day life it just means that I get headaches often and tend to see an extra outline of objects, and trying to look at things that are too close to my face can be painful, but it has gotten just worse enough since having kids that I cannot handle watching movies on the big screen anymore. I miss it, though, and when Guardians of the Galaxy was in theaters last year I decided that surely my vision wasn't really all that bad and we should give it another shot; I lasted maybe five minutes into the movie and felt so sick we had to leave.

But like I said, the first Avengers movie was not at all a bad last movie to see in theater. We went opening weekend for my birthday while I was pregnant with Little Bear.

And now, I'm off to wake people up and get them ready for Kit's baptism this morning. Say a prayer for us that Little Bear and Kit both cooperate all through Mass today? Thanks! Hopefully later today or tomorrow I'll be back with pictures!