Our first winter

Our house has two levels so I knew it would take a lot to heat it. I didn't expect the heat to stay on most of the time.

We have the thermostat set to 65 while we're gone and 68 when we're home. That means it's comfortable upstairs, but chilly downstairs.

Brad gripes that we should turn the heat up more, but I keep thinking about how hot it gets upstairs and how much energy it takes to get the downstairs up to snuff.

Plus I think it may be a little drafty down there. I noticed a little hint of daylight sneaking around the side of our front door near the floor where it doesn't quite touch the weather stripping. I'm hoping a quick trip to the home improvement store for some extra stripping will do the trick.

There is also a really random draft coming from under one of our kitchen cabinets. It's a spacer cabinet beside the oven, and I can't for the life of me figure out why there's a draft. I stuffed an old towel in the cabinet and it seems to have taken care of the cold air, although I wonder if there is a bigger problem there. If we ever save up enough to replace the countertops I'll investigate deeper.

We got our first winter utility bill in the mail the other day and I was very pleasantly surprised. Remember I had a miniature stroke when I found out how much we had to deposit to have the utilities turned on, a figure that was supposedly double the average utility bill from the previous owner. The deposit was $500! That means their power and water/sewer averaged $250 a month. Our highest bill to date is $135.

Either they ran the heat with the door open, or the system for determining deposits is flawed.

The good news in all this? When the summer rolls around and its time for our deposit to credit back to us, we won't have to pay a utility bill for almost six months!

P.S. Here's a photo of our now crippled tree. I hit up an after-Christmas sale for a new one (bigger, fatter and multicolored - awesome).

Cable gets a facelift

I turned on the TV this morning to a pleasant surprise.

Time Warner Cable announced that it would push their digital cable programming onto Statesville's Adelphia shell today. I forgot.

What a pleasant surprise.

We received a packet in the mail late last week with details on the changes. There are a few things I've already noticed, for those of you with Statesville cable:

• HD channels have moved. Instead of the 700s, HD channels are now in the 600s. This is important to note if you have DVR and record your broadcast shows. Unless you reset your series recordings, you won't get "Private Practice" or "Kid Nation" tonight.
• There are more channels. My soul smiled a little this morning when I was able to flip between Discovery Health and Bravo.
• The menu looks better. Instead of some pre-1990, first generation PC looking menu, this one is sleek and silver.

Some things I haven't noticed yet but hope are changes I'll see:

• The commercials say Time Warner is the home of free HD programming. Under the Adelphia shell I was paying $5 a month for the HD tier, which was just the broadcast channels, ESPN and a couple Discovery channels. I've already been told that Statesville is not the home of free HD programming, but I hope that with this upgrade we can get in on that action. I'm concerned that we won't because why would a business give up money?
• The mailing we received said we would have more HD channels, namely TBS and TNT. I didn't see them in my channel menu this morning, but I'll be sure to check the new channel listings in the mailer when I get home.

Most of all, I hope the new upgrade will keep my cable box from going on the fritz every couple weeks. Sometimes it forgets to download channel guides and sometimes it looks a lot like satellite TV during a bad thunderstorm.