Saturday, July 16, 2011

Battling the heat wave

It's days like these that make me look forward to the winter slush.  How do you get through the summer burn?  My brain is scrambled, and I have the beginnings of a sunburn.


My summer choice for combating the escalating temperatures?

More experiments in the cold room.

3 comments:

unlikelygrad said...

My current apartment is on the top floor and has 3 large west-facing windows (basically: one for every major room). It turns into a solar oven around 3 pm; even closing the shades doesn't help much.

Needless to say, staying in my air-conditioned lab or (better yet) my air-conditioned BASEMENT office always seems like a fantastic idea at this time of year. Even on the weekends.

Doctor Pion said...

It is easier to deal with summer heat if it is a constant presence. (By "constant", I mean that we won't see 65 degrees for months on end.) It is much harder to deal with a few weeks in the 90s, because you can't adapt.

One way I adapt is to wear long sleeved shirts until it is regularly in the 90s. Another is to wear a hat to keep off the sun.

We keep our house at 78 in summer, which makes the transition easier. Ditto for not using any A/C in the car in the morning or for short trips.

Our campus offers another alternative, which is to keep buildings so cold in the summer that you need a long sleeve shirt to keep from shivering. That has the advantage that 90 to 100 deg heat actually feels "nice" for about 5 minutes. I can walk between buildings without breaking a sweat.

x said...

I'd like to say water parks, but yes, air-conditioned office for me as well...