The Furnace

This afternoon, I realized that the furnace was running constantly but the temperature remained right at 60 degrees. This had never happened before. Usually, I think the house is too warm and back the thermostat down to 60. This morning, though, I felt chilled upon getting out of bed and bumped up the thermostat. However, the temperature did not increase and the furnace kept running non-stop. So I called my dad and he quickly deduced that there must be air in the water lines that run to the radiators (my house is water heated from a boiler). Okay, that made sense, but the next question is how to get the air out. Well, it turns out that there is this special key that fortunately my grandpa still had. So Grandpa stopped by a little later and we started bleeding the air out of all the radiators. Eager to see if the problem was resolved, I turned the thermostat up to 70 and headed to church. Six hours later (we had extra band practice and a D.R. meeting), I arrived back to a balmy 70-degree house. The thermostat is definitely back down again - that is just too warm for this guy. Anyway, I really started to think about people who don't have a furnace. Sixty degrees actually felt uncomfortable this morning. What about people who don't have a place to call home? What was it like for them during this recent bitter cold spell? Here I was concerned about the thermostat not going above 60. What were they concerned about? Probably, they were concerned about their lives.