bring the heat (please)

Mike and I don't have a considerable amount of visitors at our apartment. There are a number of reasons for this: we're very busy, we're rarely home ourselves, our apartment is messy and unorganized, etc. etc.

But as the seasons have turned and the sun has dropped ever lower on the horizon, a new reason has emerged: our apartment is cold as balls.

See, we don't have any heat. At all. We live in a pretty old building, and so the only heating solution comes by way of natural gas heaters installed in to the walls of a few rooms.

When we moved in last summer, we noticed that one of them leaked. The gas company came once to fix it, said they fixed it, and then the next day it was still leaking. The gas company came back the next day and said they fixed it again. I trusted the second guy more than the first (at least he spoke comprehensible English), but Mike and I were still uneasy about it. The gas company guy recommended that he just shut off all the heaters, since it was summer anyway, and we could call in the winter and have them turned back on.

Great, we said. Love it. Saving the energy and money. What the gas company guy neglected to mention, however, was that when we call to have the heaters turned back on, the phone dispatcher says, "Great! A technician will be at your house some time tomorrow between 8 am and 7 pm. Make sure you're there to let him in!"

Mike and I don't even have time to do laundry, so sitting around the house for 11 hours is not a viable option. As a result, we haven't been able to get the heaters back on. And now we're both going to our respective home towns for a month, so there's no real point in doing it before the new year.

No heat, combined with no direct sunlight (we have a north-facing apartment on the bottom floor), combined with cooler-than-usual temperatures, has left our living quarters uncomfortably cold. All the time. And there's nothing we can do about it but bundle up. I now sleep in a sweatshirt, two pairs of sweatpants, and socks -- combined with 4 blankets on top of my usual comforter. I think Mike has actually started sleeping in a sleeping bag. It's kind of like camping, but without the ability to actually make a fire. And we're out of smores.

So I beg of you, anybody, please bring something that generates heat. I'm about three days from just icing over.