#downstairs is usually 70-72 degrees

[authoramalgam]

Sometimes I REALLY regret moving my bedroom upstairs

[miniscrew-anon]

The Cold War

@st0rmyskies HSH Edition because I cannot stop. I am shaking the whole household in my brain like it’s a snow globe

I dedicate this to everyone who knows The Struggle of home temperature regulation with roommates who span from radiators to lizard people.

———-

It starts with Warriors.

"78 degrees?" Wars looked down his nose at the temperature dial, perfectly manicured eyebrows cocked in offense. Having the heat pumping through the house in the middle of April was ridiculous. Especially when anything above 75 was sweating weather. He placed one hand on his hip and another to his head, sighing dramatically.

He did not spend 89 rupees of Time’s money just to have his foundation leak off his face, thank you very much!

Wars turns the temperature down to a much more reasonable number and nods contently to himself. He considers his good deed of the day done and returns to the kitchen table to steal the paper before Time can.

-----

74 degrees?!

Legend scowls, hands rubbing at his exposed knees furiously. He’d felt cold all morning but he thought it was just him. What kind of psycho would ever put it that low? That's goddamned sweater weather! And in April? When the winter chill was still in the air? What hairy mongrel could ever be comfortable in anything under 75? Does he live with goddamned yetis?

These assholes are lucky he doesn’t have the funds for black diamonds, or someone would be getting it in their charm bag for this.

The sullen young man turns it up, scowling all the while.

-----

"79? Are you for fucking real?" Wind hisses. He was already pissed that the whole house had central heating and only one thermostat that controlled the temperature everywhere. But having to trudge downstairs just to find someone actually set it to near 80 made it worse.

He’s sacrificed a lot of comfort to live with Twilight’s rejects, but this was too far. It’s like these assholes want his fucking computers to overheat.

Wind mutters angrily and twists the dial to something more reasonable.

----

"Okay, this is just ridiculous."

Twilight knows he's probably more used to the heat, being a country boy who spent his summers out in the field, but he finds it crazy that anyone could be comfortable at 72 degrees. Especially when it's still so nippy outside! Spring had only just begun, after all. And all of the shade from the nearby buildings made it that much cooler. Twilight had come in from the garden to warm up and he was not happy that warmth was nowhere to be found.

He grabs the dial and twists, putting it at 77. Then he pauses, thinking. It feels pretty cold outside now that the sun is setting - maybe he should turn it up a bit more to be safe. He turns the dial thrice more. There! Now the house will be nice and cozy.

------

Wild wipes sweat off his forehead and frowns at the dial. Someone must have accidentally bumped the thermostat - no one in their right mind would heat a house to 80.

Wild in particular liked it nice and cool, especially when he was busy cooking away over a hot stove. Which he had been for the last three hours while he made an experimental batch of pistachio and salsa cookies. He doesn't usually mind the heat but he's been baking all day, and opening the oven when it's already hot is like exposing himself to the gates of heck. He's pretty sure he's gotten a sunburn with how warm his face feels.

So he whistles cheerily and turns it down to a comfy 70, positive that everyone would be thankful he fixed it.

------

Hyrule shivers, wrapping his white coat around himself.

Maybe it was because the outside was so warm but the inside of the house felt cold. He takes off his crocs and hides them away in the back of the closet where Warriors wouldn't have to see them. Hyrule crosses the foyer and checks the temperature.

Apparently someone in the house is hot-blooded. Maybe a bit crazy, too, since 70 degrees for a house is a bit beyond the norm and pretty far from Hyrule's own range of comfort. Legends, too, now that he thinks of it.

Hyrule turns the heat up to 82. He wants to quickly warm the house before he has to go upstairs and listen to Legend no-doubly complain about the cold. But he'll turn it down before he goes upstairs so that he doesn't accidently cook his friends.

Hyrule goes into the kitchen for the first real meal of the day and promptly forgets about the thermostat in the face of homemade lasagna waiting in the fridge.

-----

Sky is Dying.

He'd gone to sleep on the couch in the living room and had woken up in the pits of Hell. He was panting and sweating, shirt soaked through and sticking to his body. When he'd gotten up from his nap he'd left a literal sweat stain on the upholstery.

Who set the temperature to 82?! Satan?!

He smacks the dial and turns it down until he can feel cool air start pouring out of the vents. Sky sighs in relief at the cold, leaving the thermostat to go sit down on the couch that sits directly under one of the air vents. He lays down, fully aware that he left the temperature a bit too low. He means to get up and turn it up, he really does, but the cool couch is so inviting. And when it does get a bit nippy he just pulls the blankets hanging over the back cushions and wraps himself up.

He promises himself that he'll get up and change it. Soon. Just after he closes his eyes for a bit. Just a few minutes, that’s all.

-----

Climbing up to the first floor felt less like walking up a flight of stairs and more like climbing the Hebra Mountains.

"Who the fuck turns a house into an ice box." Four hisses, staring at the thermostat from his self-made blanket burrito. The dial lay at a measly 67 degrees.

The mechanic had lugged his tools up from the garage with him because he'd been certain that the thermostat was broken. After all, what other explanation could there be for the house to suddenly become a part of the Arctic Circle?

But nope - turns out one of his housemates is just off their fucking rocker!

He reluctantly frees one hand and braves the arctic to dial up the heat. In retaliation for his numb fingers and chattering teeth, Four turns it up to 85. Both to piss off whatever abomination made the house that cold and also so that he'll regain feeling in his extremities faster. He returns to the garage, unapologetic of his actions.

------

In the middle of the night, a ferocious monster stalks the halls. Awoken from his slumber, sweat-drenched from the heat of the two winter blankets that had earlier been necessary, a killer searches for his prey. Down and down he travels, eyes glowing with embers of malice.

There, at the bottom of the stairs, he spots the target of his hatred. He stands before it and stares down, glowering and near foaming at the mouth in anger.

Funny how something so mundane could cause such fury. He takes hold of it, hands trembling with pure hatred, and twists.

Then, with all the strength, savagery and burning hot rage that has built within him over this last hellish day, he pulls his fist back and mercilessly sends the accursed thing straight to hell.

-----

The next morning, breakfast is unusually charged.

Wars is serving looks for breakfast, eyes narrowed and searching. Legend, in turn, lurked in the dark shadows of the room, startling housemates with his silent yet hair-raising presence. Wind had his phone out, scowling every time he felt eyes on him. Four, in an unusually sour mood, made bitter eye contact with everyone who happened to glance in his direction. Wild nervously served scrambled eggs with fresh veggies and pork sausages while Hyrule hovered near the coffee station with twitchy fingers. Twilight and Sky engaged in a conversation consisting entirely of eyebrow quirks and quick glances.

Time sips his coffee calmy, the picture of serenity despite his bruised knuckles.

And just outside those kitchen walls lay the latest victim of the Fierce Deity's wrath.

The thermostat: shattered, broken, and forever trapped on a mild 75 degrees.

[orbemnews]

Renée Fleming Was Back Onstage. Here’s What Happened First. The soprano Renée Fleming sauntered onstage in a shimmering long-sleeve gown, perched on a chair and started to sing. For a renowned performer decades into her career, it might have been an uneventful Wednesday evening at the Shed, the expansive performance space in Hudson Yards. But after 13 months in a pandemic, a sea of faces was a novel sight for the opera star and the trio accompanying her. “Wow, applause!” she remarked after finishing the meditative opening number. “Very exciting.” Exciting, indeed — and no mean feat to pull off. After the Shed and other flexible New York performance spaces lobbied to let audiences in, it got the go-ahead to open its doors for a live event on April 2, after 386 days of shutdown. Fleming’s April 21 show there, before a limited audience, was the fourth performance in a series co-sponsored by NY PopsUp, a public-private program aimed at reviving the arts. While the 85-minute show — a mix of classical, jazz and popular music — went off without a hitch, it demonstrated that mounting indoor events in New York at this stage of the pandemic will still be time-consuming, unpredictable and expensive. To get Fleming and the musicians onstage involved dozens of hours of careful planning; hundreds of dollars in safety equipment like plastic face shields and hand sanitizer; and nearly $2,500 in coronavirus tests. All this for drastically reduced ticket revenue. And while she may have been the headliner, pulling the show off took a large cast of behind-the-scenes figures, some of whom hadn’t worked regularly in the building for months. Monday: Two days to showtime In normal times, the staff in a preshow morning production meeting might be discussing last-minute program changes or the status of ticket sales. On April 19, it was where and when Renée Fleming would get her rapid Covid tests. She would arrive to rehearse at 1:30 p.m. the next day, the staff was told, and head to the sixth floor to the smaller Kenneth C. Griffin Theater, where her dressing room was located. There, she would meet a medical technician who would administer a nasal swab. There would be no servers bringing the talent tea, coffee or food, per health department edict. “We do the barest minimum,” said Laura Aswad, the Shed’s producer, noting that Fleming, who had acted in a play during the Shed’s opening season, wouldn’t be left completely untended: Bottled water, tea bags and a kettle would be in her dressing room. Alex Poots, the Shed’s chief executive, had one big announcement to share with the staff. The venue had not received state permission to expand the size of the audience. In the days leading up to the concert, the Shed had asked to double capacity from 150 to 300, which would still only be a fraction of the roughly 1,200 people the McCourt, its largest performance space, can seat. But the state had essentially told them: Not so fast. The concert had sold out in two hours. Audience members who did secure tickets had already received the first of four emails explaining the coronavirus protocols they would need to follow. Gone was the chance to rush to a concert after work and plop down into your seat as the curtain rose. Before they entered the Shed, concertgoers would need to check one of three boxes: show proof of full vaccination; demonstrate a negative PCR test taken within 72 hours of the event; or have taken a rapid antigen test, which is less reliable, within six hours of showtime. This was such a jumble of rules and dates that the front-of-house staff would be provided printed cheat sheets for the day of the show. Tuesday: One day to showtime The guitarist Bill Frisell was surrounded by piles of sheet music — some Handel, some Stephen Foster — laid out on the dining room table and the living room floor of his Brooklyn home. He was writing out his parts in pencil, referencing a list of songs that Fleming had sent to him, the bassist Christian McBride, and the pianist Dan Tepfer. Pandemic restrictions meant only one in-person rehearsal before the day of the show, and Frisell was in study mode. He had played alongside Fleming before — they had recorded an album in 2005 — but never alongside Tepfer or McBride. “It adds a level of stress to the event, no question,” Fleming said. “We still have a lot to figure out in terms of how we’re arranging everything.” As Frisell was reviewing the sheet music to Cole Porter’s “Down in the Depths (on the Ninetieth Floor),” Fleming was up on East 57th Street, visiting her longtime hair stylist, Michael Stinchcomb, at Vartali Salon. Stinchcomb has been an avid fan since the 1990s and first met Fleming backstage at Carnegie Hall. He’s been doing her hair for more than two decades, often traveling around the world when she performs. But last winter Fleming moved from New York to Virginia, and the pandemic had prevented her from visiting Stinchcomb until the day before her Shed performance. “She was so happy to come in,” Stinchcomb said. “She’s a woman who likes to look good.” Later that afternoon, Fleming arrived at the Shed for a three-hour rehearsal, where she and the musicians discussed harmonies, tempos and spots for improvised solos. “A full rehearsal the day before a show?” McBride said. “That’s a lot in the jazz world.” Wednesday: 11 hours to showtime José Rivera pointed at the space between two clusters of seats. “From here to here, it’s 6-foot 4,” he announced, bending to scrutinize his yellow tape measure. “From here to here is 6-foot 1.” That made the grade: According to state rules, the distance between audience members had to be over six feet. He and another facilities employee, Steven Quinones, had been arranging the chairs for some two hours, ensuring that the setup matched a detailed paper diagram. “And see, this is the big aisle that people walk through, so it’s 9 feet, 5 inches,” Rivera continued, raising his voice to be heard over the whirring of a third colleague zooming around the room on an industrial floor scrubber. Five floors up, Josh Phagoo, an operations engineer, checked up on one of the Shed’s most important technologies for Covid safety: the HVAC system. Massive air handlers and chillers in the building’s engine room whirred constantly as Phagoo made sure the machines that keep the air at roughly 70 degrees Fahrenheit and the humidity at 50 percent were functional. On the stage itself, the first piano notes of the day were vibrating through the air, up to the McCourt’s 115-foot ceiling. Stephen Eriksson had arrived at 11 a.m. to tune the gleaming Steinway grand piano. While he said his business had disappeared for the first four months of the pandemic, now he is busier than ever. For nearly 30 minutes, he used a tuning wrench to make sure that the piano was concert ready. Afterward, he played a bit of Debussy and “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” “That’s a bit of pure indulgence,” he said. Wednesday: Three hours to showtime Within 15 minutes after arriving at the Shed, Fleming — who was scheduled for her second vaccine in New York the morning after the show — got the rapid Covid test in her dressing room. Negative. Afterward, she rehearsed onstage with the musicians, their instruments positioned more than six feet apart from one another, while an audio crew member in a mask and a face shield flitted around them, making sure everything was working properly. The six-person crew working the show was slightly smaller than usual, according to Pope Jackson, the Shed’s production manager. Everywhere they went, they brought along what Jackson referred to as a “Covid cart,” which contained a stock of masks, gloves, sanitation supplies and brown paper bags, which the musicians’ union requires so that players have a clean place to put their masks while they perform. Downstairs, a staff of eight security guards had their nostrils swabbed to make sure that they tested negative. Fleming and the musicians had been doing virtual and outdoor concerts throughout the pandemic, but the security staff was filled with people whose careers had been even more upended. Allen Pestana, 21, has been unemployed for more than a year after being let go from working security at Yankee Stadium; Duwanna Alford, 53, saw her hours cut at a church in Morningside Heights; Richard Reid, 33, had worked in April 2020 as a security guard at a field hospital in Manhattan, where he had tried to forget his health fears and focus on the hazard pay he was receiving. This was the moment before a concert where the theater was alive with preparation and nerves — a bustle missing in the city during the first year of the pandemic. “It’s like doing the electric slide, the moonwalk and the bachata all at once,” Jackson said of the minutes before showtime. “But when the lights go up, it all fades away.” Showtime The front-of-house staff had only 20 minutes to review the audience members’ IDs and Covid-related documents; take their temperatures; and show them to their seats. Icy gusts of wind just outside the doors weren’t making things any easier. But by 8:05 p.m., 150 people had settled into their precisely placed seats, able to snap a photo of the QR code on the arms of the chairs to see the concert program. In between performances of the jazz classic “Donna Lee” and “Touch the Hand of Love,” which Fleming had once recorded with Yo-Yo Ma, the artists chatted onstage about what they’d been doing with their lives for the past 13 months. “Wishing this pandemic would be over,” McBride said. Tepfer said he had been improving a technological tool that made it easier for musicians to play in unison over the internet — a tool that he and Fleming had used to rehearse together virtually. Frisell had not performed for an indoor audience since the beginning of the pandemic. “This is such a blessing,” he said. The show ended with a standing ovation, and then the musicians played an encore: “Hard Times” by Stephen Foster, which Fleming described as a song that tends to resonate in times of crisis. “Hard times,” she sang, “come again no more.” Source link Orbem News #Fleming #Happened #Heres #Onstage #renee