“The game’s in the refrigerator, the door’s closed, the lights out, the eggs are cooling, the butter’s getting hard and the Jell’o’s jiggling.
The morning is cloudy. It is already getting hot. The forecast is sun and a high of 79˚. Yesterday I turned on the AC for most of the day. I was comfortable. Henry didn’t pant.
When I was a kid, we didn’t even have a fan. Upstairs was hot. Downstairs was always cooler because my mother kept the shades down and the curtains shut. She seldom used the oven because it heated the whole kitchen, a small kitchen. I don’t remember ever minding the heat even at night. My days were so full I was always tired and fell asleep easily. Last night, in the wonderfully cool house, I fell asleep just as easily.
The day of the deck has begun. Skip, my factotum, has been missing in action. I called and left messages, and I wrote to his friend Bobby on Facebook who is usually with him, but I got no answers. Don is outside starting work from a list. The first job is replacing the rotted wooden floor of the outside shower. He also has to remove three front fence posts which have rotted then replace them with new posts. That’s not so easy as flowers cover the fence. The herbs and flowers for the deck have to be potted, but I still need more flowers so I’ll go in a bit to Agway.
When it got really hot, pre-AC, I’d sleep downstairs on my pull out couch and leave the back door open to catch any air. After I bought a fan, I moved back upstairs and had the fan blowing right on me. Then I got an AC for the bedroom, and my room always got cold. My house redo included central air. It was the perfect choice. I love lolling in my cool house.
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June 23, 2020 at 11:27 am
Hi Kat,
When we moved to Texas in 1953 we were totally unprepared for the summer heat. My father had air conditioning installed in his new Buick and our apartment had an attic fan which didn’t offer much relief. My parents quickly purchased a window air conditioner which cooled the downstairs area of our apartment. To survive the heat we all camped out on the living room floor. We relied on window unit air conditioning until we moved into our house in 1955. Before the summer we installed central AC. Many homes didn’t have central AC in those days. Unfortunately, two of the hottest and driest years on record was 1953 and 1954. The explosive growth of the sunbelt was a direct result of widespread installation of air conditioning.
Early this morning thunderstorms rolled through the area and there’s a chance of rain during the day along with mild temperatures.
June 23, 2020 at 3:39 pm
Hi Bob,
I remember a banner on the marquee of my movie theater which said Air Conditioned. It was rare back then. We had summer heat but nothing like Texas summer heat.
It was a long time before any parents bought window AC units for downstairs and for the two bedrooms upstairs. After my mother passed, we had to ready the house for sale and central AC was added. I added it to my house during the big redo ten or so years ago. I am so glad I did.
A good sea breeze is keeping the afternoon cooler. My house even without the AC is comfortable. We have no rain in sight.
June 23, 2020 at 6:47 pm
Good news and bad news. The good news is that my furlough ends on Friday, HOORAY! The bad news is that unless I’m teaching, I’m back to working from home. BOO. I get to go back to the training center on Monday to get IT to sign me up for some new software and get back online.
June 23, 2020 at 6:53 pm
That’s great! This is a a step toward normal.
Even if you are working from home, it will be new stuff to play with on the software. That should be interesting.
June 23, 2020 at 2:44 pm
Hi Kat,
So far I have resisted putting the AC unit in the window. I hate losing a whole window especially one on the shady and somewhat breezy northwest side of the house but it’s the only window I can put the thing in. Putting it in the window involves a lot of aggravation. Old house windows were not made for AC units.
When I was a kid our house didn’t get very hot too often. It was shaded on all sides by big maples and black walnuts. At some three of the big maples and one black walnut came down or were removed and that left the south and west sides of the house exposed to the sun all day. THEN the house got really hot and we got AC units. We should have gotten replacement trees. They’d be big enough by now.
As a kid, I slept out on the front porch during the summer. If my cousin stayed over, we slept up in the attic of the garage. It wasn’t cool up there but there were opposing windows for cross ventilation so it was comfortable. It smelled of warm dusty wood and paper wasp nests. Not an unpleasant smell. Sometimes we’d sleep on old Army surplus cots in an old Army surplus tent pitched in the back yard. Those smelled faintly of mildew but we were camping out with the critters so it was great.
It’s hot and sticky up here but not too bad yet.
Enjoy the day.
June 23, 2020 at 3:53 pm
Hi Caryn,
I also hate the window unit in my bedroom, but it is a necessity. Upstairs doesn’t cool too well even with the house AC running. I turn on the window unit and it cools all of upstairs. That air conditioner is a really old one, probably over 20 years. It is noisy. I don’t use it all the time so it has had a long life.
We rented when I was a kid. There were bushes and only potential trees which were still young. When I drove by the house not long ago, I saw how tall those trees had grown. My backyard has plenty of pine trees. I have had a few taken down as they were dead, but there are still plenty. None shade the house.
A few times my friend and I slept out in the backyard on an old tarp. We didn’t have sleeping bags, but we made some out of blankets. Girl scouting had taught me the right way to roll the blankets. I don’t remember being hot too often.
In Ghana, I always took my shower just before bed. In the dry season, I’d stay wet, grab my robe and run to bed. My being air dried kept me cool enough to fall asleep. During the worst of it, I slept outside in the backyard. One hotel had a cold room as every called it. The room was the bar, and it had an air conditioner, but with so many people, it was still hot.
It is okay here too. It will be cooler than up there as there is a sea breeze.
Stay cool and enjoy the day!