Kate's Point of View

When I travel I tend to target warm countries. (Ghana, Costa Rica, Australia and New Zealand since it was the summer there, Ecuador, Vietnam, Cambodia, Spain in the summer) I like heat. Winter is like a houseguest that overstays its welcome and when summer comes I rejoice. There is, however, one significant downside to summertime.

I like hot in the daytime but find sweltering heat during the nighttime to be miserable. I can’t sleep and I just lay there at night, slick with sweat. Wonder Boy and I don’t have air conditioning. We’ve made lots of improvements on our house (kitchen, bathrooms, water heat, windows) and making the investment into AC is just financially stupid. So we make do and are pretty good about it. Every year we hold out well past what most people would consider unbearable before we put in our window units. We dress light. We have all of our windows and transoms open and run ceiling fans. Our old house was made to take advantage of a cross-breeze.

This summer got hot so fast and we, very unfortunately, have a digital room thermometer. I don’t look at it. Ever. But Wonder Boy? He gives me regular updates. Last night one of our rooms measured at 89 degrees. The ceiling fan in our master bedroom, in addition to being a little on the ugly side, is broken.

We had a window unit running in our bedroom and got the room down to a frigid 86 degrees. It also makes an aggravating clicking noise. I tried to make light of it. I laid there on top of the bed sheets and played WordFeud on my phone. Wonder Boy was couldn’t take the heat.

First he suggested turning off the AC and running a fan. This might have actually been a decent idea but seemed like a waste of the electricity we had used to cool down the room over several hours. (That 3 degrees we cooled the room down by took 5 hours.)

Then he decided to go get the heavier duty window unit and run that instead. He carried it down from the attic and put it on the bed while he took out the smaller AC unit. I helped him pick up the bigger unit to put it in the window and we heard this loud noise. It was the noise of a huge hole being ripped into our bed sheets. We persisted and got the AC unit into the window only to find out wood braces we have to keep the window shut when the AC is in were the wrong size.

In the end we put the smaller AC unit back into the window. I went back to playing WordFeud. And for what it’s worth, sometime in the middle of the night I got cold enough I had to cover up with my blanket. All of this also resulted in a plan of action: Wonder Boy is buying a new AC unit tonight and I am buying new bed sheets.

Next plan of action? Hiding that room thermometer.