Beat the Heat

We hit triple digits this week here in beautiful Woodland, which is pretty standard for this time of year. The tomatoes are loving it, the dogs not so much.

I haven't turned on the A/C yet, mostly because I hate trying to close the house up that much, and also because it seems easier to just acclimate to the heat than to keep going back and forth between cold and hot. So far so good, but I certainly reserve the right to change my mind about this.

While working at home, I'm pretty much stuck in the hottest part of the house, so I've been trying a variety of techniques to stay cool:

• Drinking chilled drinks. This doesn't do much other than make me have to go to the bathroom constantly. However, that actually does help because the bathroom is one of the cooler spots in the house.

• Letting 14 pounds of ice melt in a wading pool in my living room. I was doing this one mostly for the dogs -- I was hoping that it would keep the floor cool since they insist on being in the same room with me. It didn't really work, but I did find it entertaining the Guido the cat spent almost two hours watching the ice melt.

• Evaporative cooling. If you really want to stay cool, this is the way to go. Get a t-shirt wet under the faucet, wring it out, put it on, and sit under the slowly spinning ceiling fan. This works so well, in fact, that I was actually cold when the room was under 90 degrees.
  

I also try not to use the oven, which sounds obvious, but one of the perks of being at home is being able to cook or bake something for lunch. I finally got smart and moved the toaster oven outside on the patio with an extension cord. That worked pretty well, but I'm toying with the idea of building a solar oven. If nothing else, it ought to be interesting.