Our new apartment is great, I’m not complaining about it. It’s so great that it has a fancy thermostat, the kind you control not only by adjusting the display on the wall, but also via an app you can download.

The apartment’s former tenants used the app to set the thermostat on some sort of schedule, but we don’t have the app yet. It’s only available in the Dutch iTunes store, which we need a Dutch credit card to access, and the bank won’t give us credit cards until we’ve been receiving paychecks for 90 days. So for the next 40 days our thermostat adjusts itself as it pleases. It’s like living in a great apartment with some very finicky ghosts.

Our invisible roommates will get very warm, maybe they’re doing ghost workout videos or baking ghost bread, and they’ll turn the thermostat down to 16 degrees.

We put on sweaters and go to sleep but the ghosts wake up in the night, peckish and FREEZING, and they the thermostat up to 22 degrees to make themselves comfortable.

For those of you who haven’t been thinking about Celsius thermostats as much as I have lately, which is hopefully everyone, 22 degrees is very warm. I’ve been thinking about thermostats a lot. The goal of a fancy thermostat might be to think about the thermostat less, but ours makes me think about it almost constantly. I don’t mind. I like our ghost roommates, they’re helping me get the hang of Celsius way faster than I anticipated.

Our apartment has floorboards that used to match up, but right now there are quarter-inch gaps in between some of them because the apartment is a little bigger this year than usual. The apartment’s size fluctuates a bit, because of wind or because the entire city is built on sand.

Sometimes we’ll be sitting at the table and everything will adjust slightly, and sometimes I’ll wake up in the night because the ghosts have turned up the heat, and I’ll hear all kinds of shifting sounds.