I say objective, you say subjective? Let’s call the whole thing off.

Here we are, some two weeks after Punxsutawney Phil gave out with his prediction of an early spring, and from the preliminary data, it would appear that Phil is on the ball with this one. Monday morning, and the History Channel is reliving a bad day in Chicago from 1929, but the Weather Channel is reveling in the warm weather forecast for the most of the current forecast period.

If we do get an early spring, we could get a power bill that we can pay without going hungry. Kentucky Electric Power (KEP) officials in charge of offering up explanations for power bills from Dec. and Jan. have suggested that it was the extraordinarily cold weather from these two months that is responsible. So if the weather for the remainder of February stays extraordinarily warm, will we see huge reductions in the power bills? After all, our poorly insulated homes (another reason given by KEP for the high bills) won’t have to strain themselves to retain that expensive electric heat, will they?

Okay, that this has been an unusually cold winter is a subjective opinion, isn’t it? In my objective opinion, it hasn’t been all that cold. I do my nightly exercises outside on the porch deck, and there have been only a few evenings that this 45-50 minute routine has been remotely uncomfortable. The coldest temps my thermometer showed (and I don’t vouch for its accuracy) was the high teens. Put this in perspective, I can recall years where the temps got a lot colder a lot sooner and stayed that way through early April.

Of course, that won’t drop the power bills. Truth is, like cheap oil and cheap food, cheap heat may also be a thing of the past. I have a virtual dinosaur of a furnace that sits under the house that is on a very expensive diet, indeed. It consumes fuel oil. Oh, this was a cheap enough comestible when the furnace was new, but that was some time ago. Judging by the price of fuel oil at the time, it was probably just a little after the first dinosaurs, whose bodies formed the petroleum that is so scarce today, were still roaming the earth.

Well, too, there may have been more distributors in Pike Co. at the time. But alas, like the dinosaurs, fuel oil distributors are almost extinct now. There is only one left in Pike Co., and the fuel oil they distribute costs as much as white kerosene. Ouch!

So the question we must ask ourselves is, do we keep warm and die of starvation or buy food and die of hypothermia? Neither scenario presented is very attractive, but fortunately there is one ray of hope for those who would like to find a middle ground. Remember those commercials for the infrared heaters? These new-fangled contraptions will, if used correctly, provide heat for considerably less than either conventional electric heat or fuel oil.

For most homes, if you employ them for so-called zone heating, you can significantly reduce those by-now enormous monthly heating bills. They aren’t cheap, but then again, they aren’t inordinately expensive, either. And until global warming kicks in full time, they may be the best answer when winter’s winds come a‘howling.