Taking The Temperature Of The Room...

Let me begin by thanking Redbeard and and Nimgimli for their kind comments on yesterday's post and by re-assuring them and anyone else who may have thought I was under the weather - in a figurative rather than a literal sense - that I'm perfectly fine! This is what you get for trying to come over all mysterious and enigmatic. It just confuses people and gives them the wrong idea, as I'm sure any goth will tell you.

Let's begin at the beginning of what I'm afraid is going to be a very dull and disappointing story. That's kind of why I dressed it up as a mystery in the first place.

Back in December, a close friend of ours departed on a six-week trip to India, leaving behind her hamster, Captain Flapjack. She's the person who looks after Beryl twice a month, on the Saturdays when Mrs Bhagpuss and I are both out at work, so of course we were more than happy to return the favor and look after the Captain while she was away.

I had a few hamsters as a child and we had a couple here when the children were... well, when they were children... and I don't recall taking any special care or precautions with them, other than trying to make sure they didn't get out of their cages and try to set up home under the floorboards. They always seemed like fairly straightforward, low-maintenance pets. Then again, now I come to think of it, none of those hamsters lived all that long...

I also have no idea now what sub-species of hamster they would have been but I suspect it might have been the Siberian variety because we certainly never made any special arrangements concerning the temperature of their living accomodation. Jack, on the other hand, is a Syrian hamster and they really don't like the cold. (Actually, I just checked and both kinds of hamster have the same temperature requirements so I imagine that explains why the ones I had as a kid never made it through a whole year...)

According to most sources, the approximate comfortable temperature range for a hamster is between 18c-22c. The parameters vary a bit but anything below 15c is likely to trigger a hibernation response, which can be the last you see of them. 

This did seem like a potential problem, given that there's no room in our house that keeps a constant temperature, day and night. We tend to just put the heating on in the rooms we use, when we're in them and my idea of a pleasant, indoor temperature in the winter is anything in double figures. I just put on more clothes if I start to feel chilly.

The only room in our extremely poorly insulated, very drafty house that maintains anything close to a stable temperature is the back bedroom that has the airing cupboard with the hot water tank in it. It's always the room with the highest ambient temperature in the winter, although that generally means more like 10c than 20c. 

Still, it seemed like the best option, not least because it also has a four-foot long, wooden blanket chest, made, so legend goes, by my great-grandfather. It's big enough that I used to hide inside it as a child. 

That would make an excellent base for the large cage the Captain was going to live in, a brand new one with escape-proof all-glass walls because if he ever got loose in our house he would certainly never be seen again.

In mid-December the cage was constructed, the hamster was collected and transferred to his holiday home, and a thermostatically-controlled heater was installed to ensure a constant temperature suitable for his needs. Our friend departed for India and we were left to look after the Captain.

All of this, by chance, co-incided with one of the warmest spells of winter weather for more than twenty years. Where we live it felt more like April than December. We had the heating off most of the time and we were even able to leave the back door open so Beryl could go into the garden when she felt like it. 

I had already moved my own operations from the upstairs room I use in the Spring and Summer to the downstairs room I use when the weather gets cold. The upstairs room is much nicer in warm weather but the downstairs room has a gas fire and gets the winter sun through the big windows. It was so warm though, relatively speaking, that I hadn't even needed to put the gas fire on, most days.

That was the status quo all through Christmas and the New Year until, a few days ago, the jet stream shifted and, after dumping what felt like a month's worth of rain on us in a couple of days, the temperature dropped to just above zero as high pressure established itself over the country, meaning it was going to stay cold for a good while.

This was when I had the bright idea of saving some money by sharing my accommodation with the Captain. Since his room had to be heated anyway, why waste money heating another room downstairs, just so I could sit at the computer screen without getting hypothermia?

I'd already been experimenting with using the laptop as a remote terminal, slaved to my hugely more powerful PC via Splashtop. In the summer, Beryl doesn't like to go to bed too early so I'd been using the set-up to sit in the back garden after the sun went down, doing this and that on the laptop while she enjoyed the cool of the evening. It seemed like a good idea to reverse that for my own benefit , sitting upstairs in the warm with the laptop, while my PC did the heavy lifting downstairs in the cold - which of course is the kind of temperature PCs prefer anyway.

And it would have worked too if it hadn't been for those pesky kids a few unexpected technical difficulties. I'd completely forgotten the space bar and some of the letters on the last row of the laptop's built-in keyboard weren't working any more. I mean, the thing is old enough to be in a museum so it's not surprising but it had still slipped my mind.

Worse, I'd also forgotten the only spare, "working" keyboard I had lying around also has a dodgy space bar. It works but only when it wants to. I spent almost as long going through yesterday's post, adding spaces between words where they were missing, as I did writing it. 

Finally, to cap it all, it wasn't until I was playing The Dungeon of Nahelbeuk on the laptop yesterday that I realised the wifi mouse was faulty too! I swear the right button worked last time I used it but it's completely non-functional now.

All of that would probably have been enough to make the prospect of writing a long post like this extremely unappealing but you can add physical discomfort to the list. The room the Captain is in has a double bed in it and along with that massive blanket chest the furniture takes up about 85% of the floor space. 

There's no feasible place to put a desk or a table, even assuming I had one to spare, so about the only option is to sit on the bed with the laptop on one of those bed-tables with the folding legs. Mrs. Bhagpuss bought one a while ago to craft on but never used it because it was too awkward. I can see her point, now.

And that's about where we came in yesterday, when I'd been putting off writing a post all day because of the sheer inconvenience, awkwardness and annoyance of the whole thing. As I explained, I didn't want to skip a day, so I thought I'd bang out a very quick apology, stuff in a couple of pictures and an annoying song and hope to think of a better solution tomorrow.

Even I could see that would make for a pretty thin post, so I added a little mystery at the start and left the details vague so as to make it sound more interesting. I can see, reading it back, that it does sound a bit like I'm not feeling up to posting much due to some kind of health issue (Mention of being in bed, lack of energy...) but in fact it was merely a combination of parsimony and laziness.

As you may have guessed from the length of this post, I am now seated in my usual spot downstairs. I went so far as to put the fire on for a while to warm the room up so I could get this done. Captain Flapjack will be going back to his own home in not much more than a couple of weeks so my new plan, at least for as long as the cold weather lasts, is to use the PC downstairs when I'm posting, then return to the warmth of the upper hamster-room to play games, web-browse, watch Netflix and do all the other things that feel quite comfortable on the laptop.

The whole episode has made it quite clear to me, however, that I really ought to get a new laptop. And a new WiFi mouse. And a new spare keyboard. And a few other things. Saving money by never replacing anything only takes you so far...

Also, that blanket chest could probably be put to better use than storing a bunch of old jumpers no-one's ever going to wear again...