Recovering

Before last night, I'd been getting 3.5 to maybe 4 hours of sleep each night since Monday. I've wondered before how you people manage on next to no sleep. Now I know. I think I handled it remarkably well, all things considered...my brain didn't get any sludgier than usual until yesterday around 5 p.m. At around that time I began to shut down. By 7:45 I was in bed, and I slept (almost) all the way through until 5:15 this morning. I feel somewhat human.

It has been hellishly hot. The humidex hit 46 degrees for the first time in twenty three years. That's 114.8 Fahrenheit. (Incidentally, Blogger's spellcheck flags 'humidex' just like it flags 'colour' and 'labour'...I know better than to think you Yanks don't have humidity in your country...what do you call the reading that tells you what it actually feels like, as opposed to the base temperature?)

As I've said before, I don't care overmuch how hot it gets during the day, but I care very much how hot it stays at night. One morning--I think it was Thursday--I woke up to a humidex of 35. That's not normal. There's a reason 20C/68F is called "room" temperature...

My best friend from San Diego came to visit on Wednesday...and he complained about the heat almost as much as I did. I was surprised to learn that southern California isn't anywhere near this warm. Then again, he's right on the coast: there wouldn't be much humidity, and he'd get a nice cooling ocean breeze. No such thing here. Not even at night.

But Ken, you have an air conditioner in your bedroom!

Yep. And a ceiling fan, and two fans at the base of the bed.

WTF?

The A/C's an ancient floor model that's not designed to deal with a humidex in the 40s. It took the humidity out of the room and maybe dropped the temp a degree or two, but that's it. The fans--

With the A/C on, the window is, of necessity, shut up tight...which means the Honeywell Twindow fan is out of commission. We've got three fans in the room, four if you count the A/C itself? That Twindow's worth about seven of any other fan. Assuming, of course, it's not sucking in superheated air.

I hate to sound like (ha-ha) a fanboy, but I heartily endorse this thing. We bought a cheap imitation model for the kitchen--"Hampton Bay", I think it's called--and the best I can say is it's a cheap imitation.

We've had the Honeywell for five years. It's been on minimum ten hours a day for probably 300+ days a year in each of those five years. (If the nighttime temp is between +20 and -20 (68 and about -3F), that fan's going full bore.) That's probably two decades of normal use. It was therefore not much of a shock to discover this morning that one of the fans has conked out. Hopefully, we can find the Twindow's twin tomorrow.

Eva and I have very similar climactic tastes. We'd both be right at home in Antarctica. Only twice, in my recollection, have I ever complained about the cold in our bedroom--at a rough guess, it was maybe 10 degrees each time--and not for long. I don't think I've ever heard my wife complain about the cold, inside or out, as long as I've known her. There are few better sensations than being toasty warm under a mountain of covers in a frigid bedroom.

When money permits, we'll be getting this:

Behold, the Dyson Air Multiplier, the world's first bladeless fan. I'm already a huge fan of Dyson vacuum cleaners....you pay a premium price, to be sure, but you get a premium product. Give me one of these and my trusty Twindow and I'll never frolic in a pool of my own sweat again.