Our bedroom is on the 2nd floor of a fifty year old house. As soon as you’re halfway up the stairs you can feel the heat.
A few years ago we got a new air conditioner and I talked to the installer about our hot 2nd floor. “This new AC will make it a little better but you don’t have enough ducts up here. That’s your problem,” he said. I inquired if correcting that problem was costly and he laughed too long and that was the end of that.
We also don’t have an overhead light fixture to accomodate a ceiling fan and even if we did the bed is too high. We have investigated room air conditioners but that droning noise all night would make me crazy and then looking at that ugly thing hanging from the window all winter would make me crazier.
We were sweating it out (and offering it up for the poor souls in pergatory as my mother always said until the Catholics decided pergatory was over) when The Big Daddy came up with a solution. He has access to lots of ice packs (that’s what the Ebola/Mad Cow/Legionaires/Cholera/Influenza/Typhoid virus is packed in when it arrives in the lab) and so he brings them home all the time. Behind our neck, on our foreheads, lower back………….we lay on an ice pack and cool off enough to sleep. Most nights it does the trick except for the chronic cough, fever and fatigue we seem to have lately.
For our anniversary we decided to spend the night in a ridiculously expensive hotel room. A bottle of champagne was waiting when we arrived. We went out to dinner and when we came back to our room on the 8th floor it was chilly. We slept like babies with the covers on.
We had the covers on.
Ever since then we’ve been talking about that room, that bed, that air conditioning.
Are there people who really live like this? They sleep all night in comfort without a lost, sweaty ice pack swimming in their sheets?
That’s absurd.
The Big Daddy summed it up best.
“For the first time all summer I didn’t go to sleep feeling like a salmon in the butcher case.”
