Tuesday, 4 August 2009
About Last Week
So, as anyone who reads this probably knows, last week was hot. Weather-wise, I mean. High temperatures the whole week. Record-breaking high temperatures. I believe it got up to 103 degrees somewhere in western Washington.
Seeing as how this is the 21st century, the “information age,” the weather forecasts leading into the week were kinda hard to miss. I knew it was going to be hot. I don’t do terribly well in the heat; I tend to get overheated rather easily. So I did a very sensible thing. I went to Home Depot.
They had several boxlike air conditioners in stock. I of course looked for the cheapest one, which was $100. But they didn’t have any in boxes, just a couple of display ones. So I bought a display-model air conditioner for $75 dollars.
I set it up and the bedroom, and during the hot week my wife and I spent the majority of our time (time we were home at any rate) comfy in our nice, air-conditioned living room.
That was all well and good for the bedroom, but there were times when I needed to work in the office, which, due to being on the southwest corner of the house, is often the hottest room in the house. The cold air from the air-conditioned bedroom couldn’t be stretched out enough to reach the office. The air conditioner only cost $75 after all, so no use expecting such miracles from it. Instead I went and bought a $3 styrofoam cooler and constructed my own air conditioner much like this one. It worked not nearly as well as the actual air conditioner, but the air that came out of it was much cooler than the air in the office.
So the extreme heat wasn’t actually too bad for me for the long stretches. Every once in a while I’d get too hot, but I’d get in range of the air conditioner when that happened.
The funniest thing about the week for me, though, is another side-effect of living in the 21st century. The social media sites (Facebook and Twitter) became basically a week-long bitch-fest about the heat. I swear 75% of all posts last week were somehow commenting on (usually complaining about) the heatwave. Sometimes the same people would complain every day, sometimes even several times a day.
I thought the sheer volume of it was kind of amusing. Is complaining about the weather really going to make it change? I never posted a single thing about the heat (until right now, of course), and instead of complaining, which would not have made me feel any less hot, I took steps to ensure that I had nothing really to complain about.
