It’s Too Darn Hot (and the Professor Haus has no central ac)

Hell, no O, because I am writing this when it is 100 degrees outside. Inside? Well, that depends on which floor you’re on. Sometimes, even what room you are in on that floor.

Let’s start at the bottom so we can get to wherever “here” is at the moment.

The basement has no thermometer, so I can’t tell you the temp down there. It’s colder than the attic, the floor of the bedrooms, and the utility floor (kitchen, office, living, and piano room). So I’d put it in the low-80s, maybe high 70s, but I dunno.

Before I move up, in both floors and temperatures, I think there is something you should know about me that I feel low-key shame about for some unexplainable reason: I consider weather to be one of my special interests, but also the root of some trauma for me? Idk, I love it, and I hate it. I will explain.

Weather Trauma

First up, I have been through some traumatic weather events:

• A Georgia tornado, where we holed up in the laundry room, while my younger brother put a pillow case over his head and kept repeating, “I don’t want to die! I don’t want to die! I don’t want to die!”
  • My parents were elsewhere.
  • Good thing I obsessively watched TV even back then, so that I saw the warning.
• A one, two, three punch of Florida hurricanes that left me with a healthy dose of insurance claims.
  • Lost most of the roof in the first one.
  • Also, my daughter’s bedroom ceiling, which had a brand new water feature for a few months.
  • Put up a blue tarp, but then we got another hurricane a few weeks later.
  • Roof got worse.
  • So did D’s room.
  • Blue tarp up again.
  • ANOTHER hurricane shows up.
  • Roof, room, and trust in the weather ruined.
  • Roughly a month plus with NO POWER at all.
    • In Florida.
    • In late summer.
    • IDK how I didn’t die of sweat.
• More hurricanes before and after that.
  • Mostly, we sheltered in place.
    • Sometimes the power would be out for a couple of days
    • Others, it would be weeks
    • Luckily, work had icy AC
  • Once we evacuated and ended up in Tennessee somehow.
    • We went to the Tennessee Aquarium, and one of my worst nightmares came true
      • A tank, holding back gallons of water and LOTS OF FISH (the scary part), was leaking.
        • Just a steady leak from somewhere up high, but I didn’t want to stick around to see it get any bigger.
• Getting rear-ended on I95 in the middle of a torrential downpour.
  • The person who hit me got into my car to exchange insurance information
  • While he was sitting in there, a tornado went over us.
  • I was only 15 minutes late to work somehow
  • But never took that route again.

Even with all those distressing events, I still love the weather. It’s the first thing I check in the morning when I wake up. It’s the last thing I look at on my watch before falling to sleep. I wanna know what I’m in for, y’all. Also, I gotta know whether or not to close the windows, y’all.

1-900-WEATHER

I have always been a weather girlie. I would look at the weather report in the newspaper every day. I didn’t get in trouble much when I was a kid. I was more of a hole up in my room with a stack of books and very loud music. Sometimes I was reading, others I was choreographing. However, I did get in pretty big (for Jacki) trouble two times because of telephones.

One was a collect call situation with my friend Billy and an assortment of characters we made up that is totally worth its own blog post one day.

Before that, there was the time I got in trouble for calling 1-900-WEATHER too many times. I was about 8, saw the number on a billboard near my favorite independent video store, and knew I had to call it.

So I did. Repeatedly.

Was I calling about local weather? No, I was not. Most frequently, I asked 1-900-WEATHER what the weather was like in different cities in Australia. I had a pen pal there and was endlessly fascinated by (what I imagined to be) her magical upside-down world. That fascination included the weather, of course.

I also got curious about the weather in Hollywood, New York, Ohio, Hawaii, Florida, Texas, Kansas City, Italy, Germany, Spain. Basically anywhere that sparked my imagination or held a piece of my history. I called 1-900-WEATHER a lot, y’all. A lot, a lot. Mostly after my parents had gone to bed, I lived in that hazy, unsupervised nighttime space.

Eventually, my parents found out. I had no idea that calling 1-900-WEATHER would rack up charges on my parents’ phone bill, but hoo yeah, it did. And we were solidly lower-middle class, if not straight-up lower class, at this time, so a bill with that many 900-number calls had to be a major shock to their system (and their bank account!)

I remember my dad yelling at me, which he never did, while my mom hovered behind him, making sure he yelled at me enough. When she didn’t feel he’d done the job, she stepped in and went beyond yelling about the phone calls and vocalized about me as a human instead. The phone company refunded the charges I racked up, since I was a kid and all.

I never called 1-900-WEATHER again, but I still keep up with weather from all sorts of places in the world. When I (or something I love) is going on a trip, I add it to the weather rotation. If they have interesting weather, it stays there.

Here’s what’s currently in the rotation:

• Melvindale, Michigan
• Canton, Ohio
• Portland, Oregon
• Orlando, Florida
• Joshua Tree National Park, California
• Forest, Canada
• Dublin, Ireland
• Tokyo, Japan
• New York, New York
• Seattle, Washington
• Duluth, Minnesota
• Calabria, Spain

And of course, Sydney, Australia.

I also love New Orleans, Louisiana, but I want to continue to romanticize it, so I do not look at its weather every day.

Full disclosure: The heat dome that was keeping Professor Haus HOTTTTTT has collapsed, and the weather is much better now. In fact, I am sitting outside at the local ice cream stand again, and it’s gorgeous. I am having the same coffee cheesecake ice cream as before, and it is still delicious. The heat and storms took out our Internet, though, and it’s been out for 4 days. We’ve been watching a lot of DVDs.

I started this blog in the spirit of heat, and I’m gonna finish it the same way, cause I think it’s gonna be 90 outside again next week, so I’ll be going through this again.

Be Prepared

But we’re better prepared this time.

So, the basement is low 80s. The second floor (with the kitchen, piano, listening room, half bath, and my office) reached temperatures as high as 89 degrees when it was 99+ outside. For temperature regulation, I have a small desk fan and a tall Govee fan (I am a Govee stan, y’all). They keep me not miserable. There is also a window AC that we rarely turn on. One, because my plant, Barbara, lived in front of it. And two, because I ain’t a soft bitch.

Upstairs, the hottest I saw was 94.2. Upstairs we have my bathtub room (it has a toilet and stuff too), a bedroom, a guest room, Mickey’s office, and the Princess TV room where we do all our media consumption. Every room has a lovely collection of windows, so we get a decent breeze. We also have a metric ass ton of fans upstairs:

• Another tall Govee fan
• Two tall wire fans of indeterminate brand
• A tall Vornado fan
• Four desk-type fans that can move around to give breeze as needed.

A lot of time, they are just moving around hot air, though. We also have a window AC in the bedroom, too, but it ain’t do shit. It’s like pushing out medium-temperature air when what we really need is COLD.

I’m kind of glad I waited to finish this until after the heat wave broke, though, because we have two new solutions to beating the heat.

Solution Number 1:

Turning on the damn window AC downstairs. I moved Barbara to another sunny window and cleared the area of leaves and other debris. Then? I hit “on” on that lovely machine. And it cooled down the bottom floor to a livable temperature.

On the hottest of the days, Mickey moved a chair directly in front of it, so that I could sit there and read while he worked in the evenings. It was honestly lovely, and I am not moving my chair. Even if the AC isn’t on, I like it, because of this main reason: I can see my squirrel buddies outside the window.

Often, seeing them causes me to just go outside if the weather is nice, though. I have a good crop of buddies this year, much more calm and less erratic than previous years.

With this small window AC blasting and my office doors closed, we can now cool that space from 86 degrees to 78 within an hour. Less, if we move the Govee TallFan nearby and turn it on to oscillate.

Didn’t do much for the upstairs, though. We did find something that did, though.

Solution Number 2:

Window fans. Now, the jury’s still out on the real truth about how well these work, but right now, the temperature upstairs is cooler than downstairs, and that feels like we are cheating science.

Side note: do you enjoy it when your ice cream gets melty and then you eat it like soup? I do. Even when there are chunks and crumbs, which seem weird for my brain.

So, these window fans. We have two, and those two fans have three modes (these are not their scientific names, just what I say in my head):

• Suck
• Blow
• Why not both?

There are two, uh, blade areas on each of these fans, allowing them to suck the inside air out of the room, blow the outside air into the room, or one of each, so we get a circulation thing going.

We installed them on the second hottest day of the year and just as we hit “on”, a storm rolled in. The temperature dropped significantly, so it was like we had legit AC up there for a moment.

Now, we’ve had a few days with these fans in place, and they do make a difference… I’m just not sure if it’s as big a difference as the temperature-dropping storm made us think. However, we can feel the temperature drop as we turn the corner on the moon landing to head upstairs. The highest temp it’s been since we put them in has been 86, and the room has still been hangable, whereas before, at 86, it would be about 90 in there for a few hours a day. (and yes, I previously employed an elaborate system of blackout curtains, door and window closing, and fan placement up until these window fans appeared.)

After a few more weeks of testing, I think we’ll get a couple more window fans for the bedroom for sure, cause that AC ain’t worth the window it rests in. But for now, it’s 82 degrees outside, and I’m going to finish my ice cream and then take a leisurely walk home.

See you later?