We have at least one good heat wave per summer, usually before Monsoon, and this one is no surprise. It’s unusually hot by a couple of degrees, though. The outdoor sensor on my cool digital indoor/outdoor thermometer has gone to meet electronic Jesus so I don’t know what the outside temp maxed out at. I do know what the indoor temp was a couple of hours after I bugged out, when I stumbled back to the Lair for my phone and a battery to fix Ian’s clock…
It’s still fifteen or twenty degrees cooler inside Ian’s Cave, so LB and I went over there. I brought this very good Andy Weir paperback*, and there’s cold beer in the fridge, and it’s too damned hot and bright to attempt any outdoor work. So screw it. We’re taking a vacation.
LB and I came out at 4:30 to feed chickens (and dogs, LB wishes me to specifically mention that it was time to feed dogs) and now I think we’re going to head back into the Cave until dusk even though things have moderated somewhat with the help of some pre-Monsoon clouds.
Anticipating this afternoon, I filled a gallon jug and tied a piece of string to the handle, then put it in Ian’s freezer. Then after we went to the cave I came back with the big ice cube and rolled it under the chicken coop where the ladies were already sheltering. They actually will cuddle with a block of ice once they stop being afraid of it. I’ve done it for the past couple of summers under the little coop, and might should do the same in the Big Chickenhouse until this heat wave passes.
If we’d only get a steady breeze after sundown. I’m thinking of abandoning the loft and inflating my new air mattress downstairs, if the Lair doesn’t cool down a helluva lot better tonight than it has for the past few nights.
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* Which was the basis for a pretty okay Matt Damon flick which I have on DVD. But the book is much less Matt Damon Acting and much more good geeky fun.
Reminds me of going to Dallas to watch the Jays play back when there was a stadium in Arlington. Oh my goodness it was hot with the evening temps being in the mid to high nineties. It sure made the beer go down real well. I never understood how someone could get used to that kinda heat, it knocked the hell out of me and I was in my thirties.
I guess where you are it’s more of a dry heat, the kind that’s like putting your face into a hair dryer and sitting back as all the moisture is sucked out of your body. Good luck with that, I’ll stick with my mid eighties humid weather in the summer and snow in the winter thank you very much.
Remember to drink, drink, drink…
” meet electronic Jesus” so stealing that. You turn a good phrase.
Re the heat: you’re tougher than I, sir.
Seeing as The Martian was touted as scientifically accurate, I was disappointed to read Jerry Pournelle pointing out that Mars’ thin atmosphere meant the windstorm would strike “with the ferocity of an enraged caterpillar”, i.e. barely noticeable. Nevertheless, I enjoy seeing someone “science the shit out of it”.
Andy Weir acknowledged the fact that he had marooned his hero on Mars with a windstorm possessing the power of an enraged caterpillar. Also that it was a little contradictory to have Watney blown to his apparent doom by the wind in one scene and much later have him able to leave the planet in a noseconeless rocket because the atmosphere was so tenuous the rocket really didn’t need a cone. Contradictory? You bet.
His explanation? “I could have done it accurately, but then there wouldn’t have been a story. I couldn’t think of another way to get Watney marooned.”
Ignoring that obvious technical flaw and probably others I’m not knowledgeable enough to notice, it’s a very enjoyable yarn.
Joel, is there any place outside you can hang your hammock? Nice and airy, that.
The beauty of fiction is the release of the constraint of facts ‘n such. Our politicians demonstrate this.
I think we all kept waiting for the boisterous windstorm to hit again and test his garbage bag/duct tape airlock repair. That it would hold air was riduculus.
Methinks Joel would do just fine on the Red Planet.
Alas, ff, for every advantage there’s an equal and disqualifying disadvantage. The hammock is lovely nice and airy but this is the season of flying bugs. Now (I’ve already had this internal dialogue) I also possess a mosquito net. So if I had two trees from which to suspend the hammock, and then a third in the middle from which to hang the net…
At that point things start getting too complicated.
Just a tree you like,
plus two more concrete piers with inserted “artificial” trees, and done?
Well, done thing if/when you decide you like ff’s idea?