Unintended Consequences

The outdoor temperature was – 17 degrees this morning. Even with all the windows shuttered, curtains drawn and doors locked tight, cool drafts feathered in from under the stove and slid cold fingers forth from sliding glass doors. I was so grateful to be in a warm house with functioning pipes that I did not even mind the drafts. In fact, the frigid air reminded me of a story I heard at lunch several weeks ago, and reminded me to welcome a bit of outside air.

Back in the 1960’s builders were working on building airtight homes for the first time. They planned to eliminate the leaks and reduce heating costs – admirable goals. But they were well into planning and even building the first few models before some reputable builders noticed a problem – if there was no air coming into the house, the furnace would have nothing to burn. Fires need to burn oxygen, and in older homes this oxygen came directly from leaky windows, doors and faulty joists. When homes were sealed, builders needed to devise a new method of bringing oxygen to the furnace – via air piped directly from the outside. They also needed to return the exhaust specifically to the outside. Without these precautions, people could actually die from inhalation of fumes or, actually, from suffocation. My lunch companion thought he could remember that several people actually did die from these circumstances, but I can’t find these stories to verify them. Anyway, I’m grateful for my modern furnace and for my leaks.

Another - more humorous - unintended consequence has brightened up the last two days of staying home with the children. (School was closed for “extreme cold” if you can believe it. I am sure that when we were in school it was only cancelled for flash floods, hurricanes or multiple feet of snow.) We’ve been home together, talking, yelling, crying and singing for the past two days. Turns out my four-year-old has quite a song repertoire. He learned to sing only in the past year, and due to the lateness of this development his collection is peppered with dance music from his siblings, old favorites of his parents, and the soundtracks to various cartoons. When he strings his favorite phrases together it goes something like this:

“Row, row, row your boat . . .and take me down to the Paradise City where the grass is green and the girls are pretty! Jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle all the way . . .and tonight’s gonna be a good night, tonight’s gonna be a good, good night . . . when you spin my head right round, right round and you go downtown.”
I’m so proud, and happy to be entertained by unintended consequences rather than snuffed out by them.