The Dino-Aspie Ex-Café (for Those 40+... or feeling creaky)

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[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_PkxJq0N-w[/youtube]



Good luck, reika!! !
(I don't have heat, but it may be a preferable option it you need to escape).

Top o' the mornin' to ya, Chuck!

It's been a mild (as in not too scorching) summer so far. On Christmas afternoon it got cool enough for long sleeves. That'll change by the end of the month, I'm sure, right around the time the kids start the new school year. It's tolerable when most of the classes are in fixed buildings with good air-conditioning, but not so great when the class is in a demountable (i.e. "portable" building) with a small AC unit struggling under the load.

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I understand what you're saying Blessed, but it very different here.


Here we have 80F most days of the year at the least and 98F for at least two solid months with 100% humidity. It's usually in the 90's from at least July to November. This is a swamp that has been drained so humans can live here. I went to Arizona (the desert) and ran the heat at night in July because of the temperature drops. When it's in the 90's here during the day, you are lucky if it gets to 80 at night. If you are smart here you have a concrete block house because it stays cooler and it tends to stay standing after a hurricane. Almost all Northern homes would be a pile of sticks. My house has survived four and it's only six years old.

By contrast, we may run our heat two days a year. That's average. We might run into a few aberrant years where we run the heat for a few weeks, but that is maybe once or twice in thirty years.

We also have things like putting houses up on blocks which Northerners promptly came down and stopped doing because it looked trashy. Little did they know it was to keep the subterranean termites out. Now they pay hundreds of dollars a year to have them "treated" and thousands more on their homes to have the materials "treated." There's also this nice thing called black mold which seeps into the cracks of their foundations and costs hundreds of thousands of dollars in insurance money which makes all of our premiums go up.

These things exist up North but nothing like down here. This is a sub-tropical swamp. I have alligators in the pond at the end of my yard no matter how many times they come and take them out. My trees have to be trimmed every two weeks or they will literally grow to the ground in months. The grass has to be mowed twice a week to look normal and at least once a week or it's a foot tall. The grass up North won't grow here and our grass has roots that grow along the top of the sand or swamp muck. If you dig a hole here, it smells like cow manure but it's really swamp gas from decaying vegetation.

I guess what I'm saying is I constantly hear all of this from people who move down from up North, but my air conditioning bill is the same on a day-to-day basis as my relatives in MI with their super-insulated houses. In any event, they can't compare what's happening there to here because their temperatures cool off much more at night and their number of concurrent days at 90 degrees or higher that never drop below 80 at night isn't even comparable. We run the air for 10 months out of the year and many times more. If you left your windows open, all of your walls would be covered in black mildew in a week. So you build with concrete to survive the elements and stay cool. You put a tin roof off because you'd have to bleach the black mold off a normal roof (which is what everyone does to the "new" houses built in a closer proximity to the Nothern style). The bleach and power washing takes off the coating on the shingles and the roofs leak and fly off during a hurricane. So down here you can have the old style cracker house that survives this environment and works well in it (and improvise for the two or three cold days a year) or you can spend thousands upon thousands of dollars to feel like you have a Nothern house with all it's insulation, etc. and have it eaten by termites, covered in black mold or blown away in the first hurricane.

And when a hurricane or tornado comes, forget going to the basement. We don't have basements here because they'd be called swimming pools.

Anyway, I don't know if that explains it better or not. It was my best shot.

Lurking in the murk....
It was 17°F this morning and we haven't been getting the "Alberta Clippers" yet!