Give me fucking steam, already

Now, I like to consider myself an intelligent person, but there are certain things I don't like (like fire), and certain things that are categorized under "I push the button and it works". My heat is under the latter, and the boiler that powers it is under the former.

My expectation, then, of the fucking heat, is that when I push the little switch on the thermostat to "heat", and program the temperatures on the thermostat to "not freezing", the heat will automagically kick in and make my house comfortable.

In large part, this is exactly how it works. My house is very comfortable. Except for my bedroom, which is fucking arctic.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm not one of those people that likes their house to be eighty in the winter and still wears a sweater and wool socks. 70 is the highest my thermostat is ever set, and that's in the am so that we have extra hot water. That's really all I ask.

I investigated, because leaving my door open all the time to benefit from the heat in the rest of the house is clearly not an option. I put my hand on my radiator, and was thankful that it wasn't quite cold enough that my hand would stick. I put my hand on the other radiators, and quickly jerked it back because they were very hot. Not cute.

I go online and start trying to educate myself about steam heat and radiators (since that's apparently what I have, who knew) and am confronted with a miserable morass of obscure terms and incomprehensible troubleshooting instructions. I can't very well do anything if I don't even know what you're referring to, now can I. There was much waving of hands and whining and frustration and girliness.

The one thing - the one thing - I manage to figure out is that my radiator needs to be tilted towards the pipe going into the floor, so that water can run down it. Okay, that I can handle. I dig around and come up with a piece of cardboard, which I fold in half and attempt to place under the far end of the radiator. Mind you, I wasn't even aware of the fact that the radiators were not actually secured to the floor. (I told this to Jay. His response? "Well where the fuck are they going? Nowhere, that's where.")

I manage to heft up the end of the much-heavier-than-it-looks radiator and shove the cardboard under, all by my lonesome, and I realize that the cardboard will compress and thus be useless. I find a useless trade magazine and shove it under there too.

I am soon rewarded with mild warmness in perhaps 10% of the radiator. This is better than before, so I am gratified. The rest of the radiators in the house were cool, so I wasn't expecting lots of heat at that time. I slept with my door half open, to again benefit from the heat in the rest of the house and also freak my shit out, and went to work today.

I came home to discover the house toasty-warm, and my room, not so much. Once again, I had a cold radiator and no one else did. God fucking dammit. Okay. The knob is open, the system is on, I almost burned my thigh in the bathroom again (the radiator is RIGHT. NEXT. to the toilet. Seriously). What the hell else could it be?

Okay, maybe it's the air vent. I don't feel comfortable with actually taking it off, so instead I get the brilliant idea that maybe it's clogged and I can poke around with a pin! So I do. Thankfully, steam did not come rushing out at my hand.

However, the radiator heated up. Hooray! I enjoyed warmth and closed the door to my room.

And then froze my ass off, because for some reason, my room is determined to be cold.

I fucking give up. I pushed the button. Where is my heat.