Heat wave

I'd forgotten how difficult it was to work when it is 95-100 degrees outside and you don't have air conditioning.

Yesterday was a scorcher -- apparently it topped 100 degrees downtown -- but luckily the storm clouds rolled in during the early evening, and helped to cool things down a little. No such luck today: there was hardly a cloud in the sky all day. It's 7:30 in the evening, and it's still in the mid-nineties out there.

Last summer, we tried cooling the house at night with window fans, but it still became an oven every afternoon. The heat drains me and makes me not want to work, so I had difficulties keeping up with assignments. I worked a lot in the basement, where it was slightly cooler, but that's not much fun because it's not as comfortable (furniture-wise -- it's mostly storage).

This year, we bought a portable swamp cooler early in the summer; it has a wheeled base and sits in front of a window. We have to fill it with pitchers, but it holds six or seven gallons, so it's not a big deal. Unfortunately, on really hot days -- such as today -- the swamp cooler doesn't work as well as I would like. The air it blows seems to only get a certain number of degrees cooler than the outside air, so the hotter it gets the warmer the air.

The end result is, even though our house is fairly small, on days like today only the living room stays anywhere near a comfortable temperature. And sometimes even there it's not truly "comfortable." Unfortunately, this appears to be the beginning of a week-long trend: the forecast is predicting high temperatures (and not predicting many clouds or storms) all week.

I am not looking forward to it.