But while underfloor heating may be an efficient way of warming up the 21st-century home, you can't exactly gather around it.
It was in Devi that four companions and I gathered exactly a week before the election and inevitably made predictions.
Sitting in a centuries-old building with it's cosy, low roof, I felt safe in the knowledge that for hundreds of years before me people had gathered in exactly the same place, to do exactly what I was doing; to drink and think and do not much else until it all blows over.
"If in Moscow, a city of many millions, 200 people want to gather exactly on the 31st, exactly on Triumphal Square, in these modest numbers, let them gather," he said in an interview.
And when exactly one year ago protesters gathered on the eve of his third inauguration, their peaceful march ended in violent clashes that, opposition activists now believe, were purposefully started by the police.
A10 Tribute to Washington's Slaves Descendants of George Washington's slaves who were freed by his widow, Martha, exactly 200 years ago gathered at Mount Vernon, the first president's plantation in Virginia, to share their ancestors' stories with tourists.
At exactly 23.59, as Spaniards gathered in front of their television sets to watch the clock chime in midnight, security cameras recorded the dozen men heading for the building's door.
And Cruz told the gathered attendees exactly what they wanted to hear.
It was exactly 60 years ago that Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein gathered together with a group of leading intellectuals in London to draft and sign a manifesto in which they denounced the dangerous drive toward war between the world's Communist and anti-Communist factions.
Photos finished, the quintet sat down in one of the building's many conference rooms, this one named for the children's show "Beat Bugs". Almost immediately the conversation veered toward why exactly they've been gathered together, and whether asking them to unite leads to a productive conversation or a creative barrier.
