I had my hair cut yesterday (thanks for noticing :) and while my stylist was doing her thing, another woman came in and was seated at the basins to have her hair washed. She struck up a conversation with the junior, and as she was right behind me and I have stuck with my stylist partly because she doesn’t fill every second with inane chatter about holidays and the weather, I could hear most of what she was saying.

And although I don’t think the weather has been particularly cool this autumn, and this woman obviously lives fairly close by, she was saying that her house is so cold at the moment that she has packed her daughter off to live with her grandparents. Presumably her heating is broken or something; she also said she was spending her evenings under a blanket in the living room, with an electric heater on.

Meanwhile, the temperature in our kitchen has dropped to around 15 C overnight, but the main house (the kitchen was the garage, if you remember) isn’t dropping below 19 C at night. We haven’t even considered turning the central heating on yet, although there have been a couple of days when it was a bit nippy.

Time will tell of course, but we’re thinking that the difference may just be because we now have lovely thick and efficient insulation in the loft (as well as kick-ass loft boards that mean we I can move around up there and we can store our boxes properly. Therefore I am going to remind you one more time that if you’re a British Gas customer you can apply for free cavity wall and/ or loft insulation if you do so before the end of the month.

If you’re not a British Gas customer then have a look at the Energy Saving Trust website, as there are other ways of getting your hands on free insulation or a grant to help with the costs. Apparently today is the last day of Energy Saving Week, too, so there are a couple of competitions you can enter if you’ve got that Friday feeling :D as well as plenty of other ways to save energy and cut your bills.

I ran iPhoneTracker against our two iPhones and was quite surprised at where we’ve been in the past.

Firstly, this is my graph:

…and this is Emma’s:

I can’t explain the London blob, especially as neither of us have been there in nearly a year. The only reason I can give for the greater number of places I’ve been to (apart from going to more places, obviously) is that I updated my iPhone sooner and therefore the tracking was going on longer than Emma’s iPhone.

I love this application of scraping data from a file and rendering it on a map — I’m not bothered in the slightest that my phone has been tracking my movements, I actually find it useful and intriguing.