During the winter, heated air is constantly escaping from your home. During the summer, cooled air is constantly escaping from your home. If you had a brain in your head, you’d get the hell out of your home before you die of oxygen deprivation. Your other option is insulation.

Even though insulation is one of the most important and boring issues of the day, many people don’t know how it works. I certainly don’t. I have read dozens of articles about how to insulate and weather-strip my home, and they’re all full of terms I don’t understand, like this: “When caulking your windows, be sure to put a 1/8-inch bead of polyvinyl-butylacetate caulking between the jamb and the main soffit adjacent to the eave cornice, taking care not to dislodge the newels.”

Now I have looked at my windows, and I cannot for the life of me locate any of these things. All I have in my windows are pieces of wood and poisonous spiders. I don’t have the vaguest idea where to put the caulking. This is a problem because, as you have probably noticed, caulking guns are designed so that as soon as you pick them up, the caulking starts oozing out, and it keeps on oozing out until there is none left. This is a clever ploy of the caulking manufacturers to keep themselves in business.

So anyway, I end up standing outside my window, looking for the eave cornice, with caulking oozing onto my pants, until finally I give up and smear some caulking on the spiders and go inside.

So I thought, as a public service, I would explain home insulation in layman’s terms. I will do it in the handy question-and-answer format in which I make up questions and then answer them, which is a heck of a lot easier than answering real questions.