Keeping Your Cool

DEBORAH CROMBIE: I am SO NOT ready for summer! July has apparently arrived ahead of schedule! For those of you who are just now enjoying the sun on your faces and the things popping up in your gardens, I envy you.  But here in north Texas we've been hitting the upper nineties the last few days, with humidity that puts the heat index ten degrees higher. People were dropping like flies from heat exhaustion at outdoor graduations on Saturday, and we worried about the protesters as they marched through our neighborhood late on Friday afternoon. Here was my back garden in the evening a couple of weeks ago, when it was a glorious 75 and you could actually sit outside!

Last night it was 95 at the same time! So UGH. It's just disgusting. If I want to grill--and it's too hot to cook in the kitchen--I have to wait until after sunset for it to be remotely bearable.

Our leaky old--um, vintage--house is comfortable enough up until about two in the afternoon, but when the sun moves around to the long wall of west facing windows, it gets brutal inside. Yes, we have central air-conditioning, but there is only so much it can do with the old beast of a house. Unfortunately, my downstairs writing space is in the room with those west facing windows, and my real, "designated" office is upstairs with south facing windows and is converted attic space, so it's equally miserable. 

West facing sun porch windows

My first go-to cooling strategy is to wet a dish towel, hold it in front of a fan, then drape it over my neck. But when I get really desperate, I shuck everything and get in a tepid bath until my body temperature drops. 

And I am really missing my afternoon tea, which is my boost for my afternoon writing sprint. I know the colonial British believed that drinking hot tea cooled you down, but it sure doesn't work for me. Will I have to switch to so-not-British ICED TEA? 

So REDS, what are your tried and true tips for beating the heat?

HALLIE EPHRON: Oh, Debs, I feel for you! Heat really can wear you down. And you must have to water that beautiful garden of yours every single day. 

I swear by a cool shower. Then get out and just stand there and drip dry. At a minimum, standing in some cold water and splashing some on my neck, the backs of my knees, and inside of my arms. 

DEBS: Hallie, I water the back in the morning, when it's shady, and that's fine. I might be wetting myself down with the hose once or twice, too!

LUCY BURDETTE: Debs, do you have shades on those windows? We sprang for some in Key West this year and it makes a big difference in the afternoon. And I was doing my walk either early or after supper because otherwise just too hot.

If these were normal times, I’d say go to the library or a coffee shop! But of course life in anything but normal...

DEBS: Lucy, we do, as you can see in the photo of the porch. They go down about noon, when the sun starts to creep around the house. They are lined, but it's not black-out. It wasn't nearly as miserable in this room before last year when the neighbors cut down the tree that shaded our whole deck, patio, and the west side of the house. Black-out shades and solar film were on my pre-pandemic list...

RHYS BOWEN:  Last week it got to 110 degrees in Arizona. Literally too hot to go outside. We walked before 7 am and then were prisoners in air conditioning all day. So my way of coping was to admit we needed to risk driving back to California. 

I need not have been so paranoid. Rest area bathrooms were sparkling clean and empty. We spent the night at a lovely hotel in Pasadena. Again they too used every precaution: remote check in, man walking around with sanitizing spray. We arrived back in Marin County to find it was 98!  Not fair!!

However it has now cooled to a blissful 70 and I can sit out on my deck, drive to visit my daughter, so all is well. And our house here has a whole downstairs floor that is always cool so now I can face the summer.

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: Debs, I have an old house, but of course mine leaks at the opposite time of the year - in winter. I second Lucy’s suggestion if you don’t already have them - shades. Every window in my house, except for the kitchen, is curtained or has blinds, and in the summertime, if the sun is shining in, the curtains are CLOSED. 

My working-while-hot aid is an old fan, which I keep on while I’m at my desk. Even if it’s hot and humid, I find sitting in moving air makes me comfortable. 

 

Julia's scary fan

I agree with you and Hallie on a cool bath/shower. On hot nights, I’ll sit on the side of the tub and soak my feet in cold water (ours comes from a well 50 feet below ground, so you can bet it stays icy even in August.) When they’re almost numb, I’ll step on a towel so as not to drip and then go straight to bed. It really helps!

DEBS: Julia, I take that tepid bath right before bed. It makes a huge difference in sleeping comfort--not to mention the fact that I spend every day covered in sunscreen and mosquito repellent, so am not going to bed sticky!

I complain about the leaky house in the winter, too, just not as much:-) More layers will usually do the trick. And when it's cold downstairs in the porch, it's cozy in the upstairs office. It's having no comfortable place to work in the summer afternoons that is making me crazy.

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Oh, raising hand for old house, too. Ours is from 1894, and we love it, but when it's really hot outside, it's impossible inside. I did a Zoom the other day, and it was SO HUMID that I gave up, and said on the Zoom: hey, part of the entertainment is going to be watching my hair get puffy. Truly! I have a Dyson fan, which is silently awesome. Time to bring it up from the basement, I guess.

But yes. We have discovered, (because the food delivery people, bless them, serendipitously brought us lime tonic water), gin and super-lime tonic. Lovely. But only on weekends. (I know, what's a weekend?)

READERS, how do you manage the heat? Does anyone find that a hot drink cools you off? Or is that a total myth?

How to Beat the Heat

DEBORAH CROMBIE: I know we are a few weeks past the summer solstice, but SUMMER really arrived in north Texas this past week!!! We know it's coming, we should be prepared, but we were not!! It didn't help that we had an exceptionally long, cool spring this year, so less time to get acclimated. But, now, wow. Up until yesterday we were flirting with 100, with a heat index hovering between 111 and 113. Ack!! Yes, we have AC, but our old units are cranking like mad to keep this old house in the low 80s.

So what to do?

Don't cook, at least not on the stove top or the oven. Rice maker, slow cooker, instant pot (absolutely fabulous way to cook without heating up the kitchen!), grill. But I can't even face the grill until the west sun is off our west-facing deck. (None of this is helped by the neighbors having cut down the tree that shaded our back yard, our deck, and our west-facing sun porch.)

Do all the outside chores as early in the morning as possible. I'm watering the potted plants twice a day now...

Drink lots and lots and lots of water. And iced tea. (I don't even normally like iced tea.)

Fans.

Afternoon naps.

When all else fails, I put a wet dish towel around my neck.

Cool baths before bed. Heaven.

And, ice cream. If you  need an excuse.

REDs, what are your tips?

HALLIE EPHRON: My office is tiny and it has an air conditioner... so when it gets really bad I live in there. Sleep in there mattress on the floor. So far it hasn't been that terrible so I've managed with fans and when I get desperate, go out and water the plants and myself at the same time. And yes, drink lots of water. Fortunately our garden is very shady -- our neighbors are tree-huggers, as are we.

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: No a/c in my house. Fortunately, living in Maine I can take advantage of the 25-30 degree temperature swings between day and night. I close the windows and the sun-facing curtains in the morning and open them again at night. Fans in the windows bring the cooler air into the house, so it feels fresh and pleasant in the morning. I've read about, but haven't tried, Solar film/solar shield/sun shade, all of which stop a lot of the solar gain from ever getting inside your windows (and can be removed when the cold weather comes again.)  There are two rooms that aren't sheltered by the attic and thus heat up - I close the door firmly and forget they exist until nightfall. Pro tip: make sure the cat isn't hanging out in a patch of sunshine before doing this.

Like Hallie, I use fans wherever I work, including a large box fan that sits in the cellar doorway and sucks cold air up into the kitchen (and scares the cat.) I slow down, I drink lots of cold water and sugar-free Kool Aid. My secret weapon for really hot, humid days? I go to the movies!

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: There's this great stuff, sugar free fizzy pink grapefruit drink. It comes in a slim plastic bottle. I twist off the cap, take two delicious sips, then put the entire bottle in the freezer. Then I set a timer (I know my limitations) for fifteen minutes at a time until it is nice and slushy. IT IS GREAT.   We have no ac in our 1894 house--but somehow it stays fairly cool.. Except for about two weeks a year  when it is UNBEARABLE. Then I just carry my fan from room to room.  We do have a window AC in the bedroom--which is so weird, because sometimes it it too cold!  And sitting in our back yard in the shade by the pool is ten degrees cooler than anywhere else. Oh! yes, how could I forget. We float! We get blow up floater rafts, and get pink grapefruit drinks and books, and then float on the pool and read. Come over and do it with us!

DEBS: Hank, that sounds so heavenly I may come all the way to Boston to stay with you!
And I've been buying boutique blackberry lemon ginger beer at the farmer's market. I keep it in the drinks fridge and just take one or two sips when I'm really hot. But maybe I should freeze it a little bit!

READERS,  please tell us your heat secrets!!!

Summer Splash

DEBORAH CROMBIE: Can I just say that it's hot? I mean, really hot. Maybe not New Orleans hot, but sticky, icky, suffocatingly hot. Not that this should come as a surprise, because it is the end of July and it is Texas and it's not like this is something that hasn't happened before. (Like every summer.) But we had a cool, wet spring and early summer, and we got spoiled. Then suddenly we've hit 100

degrees, which feels like a 104 with the humidity, and people will kill for something cold to drink or a shady spot in a parking lot. 

So I started daydreaming about the green pool. Some of you may remember a couple of years ago I posted about my green inflatable swimming pool-The Notorious Green Pool! The Pool had lots of fans on Facebook and people would inquire about it regularly. Here is a photo taken when it was new and pristine. (Actually, there was more than one green pool over a couple of summers, because they tend to leak, but it wore its incarnations gracefully.) It stayed amazingly cold, and I would plop in its icy water at the very hottest part of the afternoon, or before bed, when I could float and look up at the stars through the leaves. It was gloriously refreshing and sometimes I'd even have to take a hot bath to warm up.

Alas, I had to give up on the green pool. Perhaps I should explain why we don't have a in-the-ground swimming pool. Our backyard is beneath an enormous canopy of elm and pecan trees that are probably a hundred years old. Heritage trees. And they shed. Constantly. Winter, spring, summer, and fall. The maintenance on a pool would be murder.

Unfortunately, the same turned out to be true of the green inflatable pool. There was no cover for it, and I spent half my day every day cleaning the thing with a pool skimmer. My back protested, and when the last incarnation got a slow leak, I gave up.

Fast forward to this summer. My back is again giving me fits, even without skimming the green pool. When I asked my doctor if he had any suggestions he said, "Get a hot tub. Seriously." But you don't just go out and buy an expensive hot tub--and pour a concrete pad for it--on the spur of the moment. So I said I would think about it. Later.

Then I came across this: the Bestway Laz-y-Spa Miami Inflatable Hot Tub. On Amazon. With Prime shipping. Supposedly, it holds four people. (Small, very cozy people, I suspect, but I don't care as long as it holds me.) It has a cover. It's got bunches of 4 and 5 star reviews, and lots of great review videos. And it's $257.00, including shipping. So we ordered it, and it arrives tomorrow. A few reviewers have complained that

it only heats up to 104 degrees, but right now I'm happy with the water temp straight out of the hose. I can get wet, and it bubbles.

When I told my doctor, he said, "Have a glass of wine in the spa every day. Seriously." I said I had actually thought of that. I even ordered a cup holder for it.

I will let you know if it's as terrific as everyone says, but it has to beat spraying myself down with a mister bottle to prevent heat exhaustion...

So, REDS, and readers, what are you doing to stay cool at the height of summer?

And cheers...