It's an industry term

Nick is extremely handy, which is a super lucky thing with our oldold house.

Because me, I am all focused on the pretty, like, ooh, let's paint this room yellow!

Which it turns out you can't do until old water damage behind the walls has been repaired. For example.

There are a shocking number of things Nick can fix himself. And then he recognizes other things that I'd never think of, and goes about remedying the situation.

Like the astounding coldness of parts of the house.

It turns out our house had absolutely no insulation in the roof. And so where we are connected to side houses, we stay warm. And where we are unconnected, we were brutally cold.

We had some freezy rooms, basically because the dread cold would just mince in through the cracks, or settle on the roof and ooze on down, settling all comfy into the walls and kicking back on the floor.

Very brrr.

So Nick hired an insulation company to remedy this.

They brought a big truck and all these blocks of what turns out to be cellulose! (I am not kidding you when I asked if it was asbestos, causing Nick to look at me like I was feeble.) They fed aforementioned cellulose into this machine and shot it through a pipe into holes they made in our walls and ceilings.

It was a tremendous process, filling our space with wallboard dust and tubes and cellulose and probably years worth of stuck in the ceiling dirt.

But now we are much warmer.

We have this little cupola, under which we've put two chairs. It's a nice, cozy place to sit. So last night, I looked up and realized there were a ton of patched holes in the ceiling.

"Why so many holes?"

Nick reached up and patted the slanted ceiling. "It turns out it was incredibly cold behind these walls."

Somehow I immediately pictured the sudden cold that would appear in the Sixth Sense, where you could see your breath. I imagined a very technical process for determining cold, very cold, incredibly cold...

"How did they know? Did they have to use a special device? Like some kind of temperature measurer?"

Nick's nostrils flared, just a little. "A thermometer, perhaps?"