A Dry Heat

Inspirational song: I Can't Stand It (Eric Clapton)

This is just too much. All of it. A week of temperatures 10 degrees above normal, unrelenting sun, and me in a brick house. It's like living in an oven, and I'm the loaf of bread. I'm not capable of doing much of anything except lying around and baking. It's almost enough to make me question why I directed my home improvement dollars towards a new hot tub rather than a new air conditioning compressor. It would have cost roughly the same. (Okay, almost enough, but not really enough. The hot tub keeps me sane. And if I have to, I can cool it down to help me do the same.)

I spent two hours walking slowly up and down every aisle in Costco during the worst heat of the day. It was intentional, to hang out in a large, air-conditioned space, and have the a/c blasting in the car for the half-hour drive each way. Three hours of cool is better than none. I was wiped out when I got back, and barely managed to empty my purchases onto the counter before I hid in my darkened bedroom.

While there, I stared for several minutes at what I understood to be a window swamp cooler. It says it works for 1600 square feet, at 75% of the electricity draw of a/c. That would be enough for the main floor of my house, and appeals to my miserly impulses that make me not want to run a big outdoor heat exchanger. It was only like 300 bucks, too. But I have slider windows, and I don't think it works sideways if that were the only way I could make it fit. My other option, for almost the exact same cost, would be a whole house fan, which would cool the place off just as well at night, and I could close up the windows and keep that cool most of the day. It's what I've been planning on getting, as soon as I could convince someone to go up in the attic to install it (this is a big deterrent). The third option is to do exactly what I've been doing for three summers now, which is to gripe repeatedly, "This is NOT the Colorado I signed up for," and tell myself the heat only lasts two months out of the year, and that I can stand it. It's getting harder to believe myself.