80 Degrees Never Felt So Good

80 Degrees Never Felt So Good

Maybe you haven’t heard, but Colorado is on fire. We are lucky to be out of harm’s way at the moment, but it definitely feels like the entire state is on fire. We had five straight days of record highs and today is the first day we stayed in the 90s. We don’t have air conditioning or a swamp cooler, so regulating the temperature in our house to keep it from spontaneously combusting has pretty much monopolized all of our free time.

The thermometer on our porch

We’ve been running our awesome whole house fan all night to flush all the hot air out and suck cool air in, but that only does so much when overnight lows are in the high 70s. Thanks to a well insulated house our internal temperature has never exceeded 86, but it’s taken a lot of effort on our part to keep it from soaring any higher.  Four years experience of living without A/C has taught us a lot about surviving in the heat, but this week we’ve really had to use every trick in the book.

We’ve avoided the oven by cooking on the grill, utilizing our dutch ovens, and strategically placing the crock pot on top of the dryer in the cool basement. Every time we heat up the skillet we put it on the porch to cool off. We’ve set trays of water in front of fans to create  a low tech swamp cooler and eaten lots of popsicles. We even tried to move our sleeping quarters to downstairs, but quickly realized we’d get more sleep in our stuffy bedrooms than we would trying to get Cooper to sleep in my sewing room.

Then this afternoon a magical thing happened. A big thunderstorm rolled in and doused us with much needed rain cooling the air down more than it had been for days. I’ve never been more happy to see a thermometer reach 80 degrees. It felt like a cool spring day.  It’s crazy what your body can get used to.

4 thoughts on “80 Degrees Never Felt So Good

  1. We didn’t have AC in our first apt in Utah and we lived upstairs. We would go to sleep at night with wet dish towels on our arms and bodies to help cool off, then wake up a few hours later with stiff, dry towels on us! It’s funny because yesterday was sunny and felt “nice and warm” here–I figured it was in the high 70’s. I read that the high was 72. Yes, it’s all relative.

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