If you have a fan, fill a bowl with ice cubes and blow the fan towards you, over the top of the bowl.
The temperature in my bedroom this morning was 89°. And tonight at 10PM, it’s still 89°. That’s not bad, considering the high got up to 98° today. The building must have very dense walls.
@MerelyGifted @OWYAC Good advice. But I let the heat be what it is, and remind myself that some people pay good money to travel to tropical climates, but I get tropical weather delivered free to my apartment. That’s what George Brent would do.
We’ve had a drop of 20 degrees celcius/30 degrees fahrenheit in southern Ontario; from 36 C/97F to 17 C/63 F in the space of two days. It’s glorious. I have all the windows open, with a frigid breeze blowing through the house. My only complaint is that somebody must be tarring a roof nearby, since I’m getting a nasty smell on the breeze. Oh well.
Today’s high was 86° and that was at midnight. Temperatures were slowly dropping all day. Current temperature is 69°. That’s about 20° C.
My bedroom is now down to 87° and it feels quite mild. My ceiling fan has been set back to “low.”
Were you able to sleep at all? I keep reading how your body needs to cool down before you’ll be able to drop off to sleep.
This year for the first time in my life I have some A/C at home. I got a little window unit and put it in my kitchen window, because that’s on the shady side of the house, plus there is a door on the kitchen so I can close it off from the rest of the apartment. Then I spent the heat wave in my kitchen. I put my sofa cushions on the kitchen floor to sleep on—a bit narrow, but surprisingly comfy, relatively speaking. It was the first time I actually got some decent sleep during a heat wave
Friends I met on stumbleupon would spend the summers pretty much living in their basement.
A long answer.
I spent the first 35 years of my life in perfectly air conditioned homes, or poorly air conditioned apartments. I could take the cold. The colder, the better. The cold was an old friend.
During my first summer in NY, I experienced the 2003 Northeast Blackout. This was one of the rare times I had to sleep without air conditioning. I felt like I was going to die.
Later, I lived here for three years. This is on the edge of a neighborhood called Washington Heights. Broadway in this area goes through a valley. The western slope was always cool, but when you cross Broadway and go up the other side, suddenly the temperature increases. I don’t know why, but this was always the case. Washington Heights is a hot neighborhood.
My apartment was cheep but pretty decent. It had one problem — the summer. The apartment was on the 6th floor, surrounded by 5-story buildings. In the summer the sun would burn down on the east wall in the morning, the ceiling at noon, and the west wall in the evening. It was a hot apartment in a hot neighborhood.
You could open windows, but the air didn’t move. Touching the walls would burn your hand. It was like living in a car that had been parked in the sun.
I bought myself an air conditioner. I would put it in my bedroom and close the door. It could not keep up with the heat. I even had a fan blowing on me. None of it was enough. But I survived.
Here is the short answer — living in that apartment for three years changed my internal thermostat. Now I’m perfectly comfortable in the heat of summer. In fact, since then I have preferred summers to winter. So, sleeping in an 87° room is not something I would chose to do, but it’s something I can do. I mean, uncontacted tribes in the Amazon must get some sleep, and if they can do it so can I.
I salute your creativity.
One of my favorite summer activities is reading while sitting on the floor under a ceiling fan.
A good tactic.
I briefly owned an older stucco bungalow in South Minneapolis. I planned on planting ivy on the south side and letting the heat escape through the upstairs windows. I never got a chance to put that into practice.
I’m on the third floor of a typical South Minneapolis duplex built in 1903, i.e., my apartment was originally the attic, right under the roof. It can get pretty hot up here with the sun pounding down. I’ve lived here for 31 years, and during some heat waves I’ve had some throbbing headaches that kind of scared me. A couple years ago when it was 106F outside and 106F in my apartment, I didn’t feel too well. And now I’m about to turn 70, and I keep reading that heat waves can be more dangerous for older people….so…I figured it was time to have the option of some A/C if it got really hot.
I always felt that way too. I like being in touch with the real weather! Thankfully I only felt I needed the A/C for two days/nights, and now I’m relieved to be back to having the windows open and using a fan—hopefully to stay that way for as much of the summer as possible
But those two days of A/C gave me a new understanding of why people use it.
Sounds like a wise choice.