Sunday, June 08, 2008

Thwarted yet again

My wish came true! It stopped raining! I can rollerblade again!
Except i can't.
After the rain stopped, mother nature cruelly threw in the only other weather in which I will not go outside and exercise in: 95 degrees.

I don't know about the rest of you, but I hate summer. I never want it to be above 80 degrees. I am ok if I can go outside in a tank top, jeans, and flip flops comfortably, but hotter than that, and I'm the most miserable person ever. You see, we don't have central air. We have one window unit for our somewhere-between-800-and-1,000 square foot apartment. This does make a difference, but not nearly enough. Last year, I set up what I thought was an ingenious method of fans to keep cool:

This year, I decided it wasn't enough and added 4 more fans to our repertoire. I believe that before this, every fan we own was given to us by my parents or in-laws. I had never bought fans before, and damn, are they expensive. I wanted to buy the modern looking, oscillating tower fans, but they were $60 each, and I couldn't justify spending almost $250 on fans. So I bought 2 small high-velocity fans and then 2 of the circular oscillating fans. Here's the new system:
It's been fairly cool today, even after I cooked breakfast. This heat wave isn't supposed to let up anytime soon, so hopefully this is a manageable system. I think the key was taking the cooler air from the back and pushing it out towards the sunny part. I've also closed all of our blinds to at least halfway, which I hate, but I'm sure makes a difference.

The worst part of all this was when JP came to me yesterday while I was doing dishes and said, "Do I have a fever?" I touched him and freaked out. After several courses of cold compresses, feet in cool water, and drinking tons of water, he was delirious. I forced him into a cool bath and then fed him some carrots (I was worried about electrolytes after all the water, plus it was amusing to watch him eat carrots in the bathtub.). His fever mostly broke after that, but hours later when I bought a thermometer, it was still at 100 degrees. That means he was probably running around 102 or 103 earlier. Yikes! Personally, I only get fevers if I am at death's door, so I was scared. Plus, JP delirious? Yeah, not fun.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Ugh...there's nothing worse than a fever in the summertime. I had pneumonia one summer in my non-a/c college apartment and I could feel my brain leaking out my ears.