Hot Times

Posted on July 22, 2002 in Weather

It’s nearly August and the cry goes out across the land “It’s too damn hot!” Crazy Tracy has moved in with a fresh air freak to end all fresh air freaks. Personally, while I love to keep my bedroom well chilled in the winter time, I prefer the stuffy air conditioned air to the broiling temperatures that develop when I am not running the air conditioner during the afternoon. The poor people in Florida. They don’t just bake: they get poached!

This entry is from my response to Crazy Tracy’s misery:

My mother was an air conditioning miser while I was growing up. She’d lose it entirely if she came home and found me running the air conditioner. So I became programmed not to run it, to endure the 90+ atmospheres inside our smog-belt Southern California home. Then a real scorcher would come. I would not dare turn on the air conditioning. And what would she do? Come home and yell at me for not having the house cool when she got home.

As an adult, I keep a fan running in every important room of the house. I don’t turn on the air conditioning until the afternoon when the sun begins to shine on the west end of the condominium building. Then I run it until about 8. By this time, the breezes have started blowing up the canyon and we can air the house out.

I should note that this is a California trick, one you can pull because the air is dry. When I lived in North Carolina, the nights did not cool down. You could shut every blind in the house, hide in the deepest corner of the cellar, and watch the sweat pouring off your body pool up and make a warm mud bath. It doesn’t work so well on smoggy days either, because the inversion layer is clamping down hard and holding in the smog and the humidity. On those days, I keep central air running for days.