(no subject)

[rivka]

Last night was so awful.

It started out well enough. My friend Emily came over to stay with Alex (yaaay, babysitting trades!) so that Michael and I could go out and enjoy Baltimore Restaurant Week - a summer promotion in which dozens of restaurants are offering special $30 three-course menus. We went to Sascha's 527, a neighborhood restaurant serving what I guess I'd describe as upscale-American food. Dinner was good, but not amazing.

I had an appetizer of pepper-crusted raw ahi tuna with what was described as an orange Thai sauce. The sauce tasted like orange marmelade seasoned with way too much chili pepper, and it totally concealed the flavor of the fish. The very, very good Asian coleslaw on the side saved the dish. Then I had their take on bouillabase, which was sort of a New England clambake version (it had potatoes and inch-thick rounds of corn on the cob in it) with a really tasty broth. Finally, I finished up with the world's best carrot cake.

We came home and curled up on the couch to watch an episode of Planet Earth. Partway through, there was a loud crack and our power went out. I looked out the window - no lights anywhere on the block.

This is where I need to back up and talk about the weather. Because it was 100 degrees Farenheit yesterday, and humid, and breezeless. By the time our power went out, I estimate that it was still over 85 degrees. Our brick rowhouse had been soaking up the sun's rays all day long. Within minutes of losing power, the house was noticeably hot and stuffy.

We called the power company and were given an estimate of 1:30am power restoration. We tried to go to bed. Meanwhile, I started worrying about Alex. Her room is on the third floor - the hottest part of the house. It works out nicely enough in winter, when her room stays much warmer than ours, but in summer it's damn near uninhabitable without air conditioning. It's a small closed room - we can't open the window because the air conditioner is in it, and there isn't much opportunity for cross-ventilation on that floor.

She woke up shortly after we went to bed, calling for Mommy. I went up to her hot, hot bedroom, disentangled her from some blankets, and helped her find her pacifier. She went back to sleep. I went back to bed and didn't sleep.

Some of the other people on our block had spilled out onto their stoops, where it was slightly cooler and (thanks to the nearby hospital's emergency generator) better lit than indoors. They apparently decided that it was a fine time to have a blackout party. We were subjected to bursts of loud conversation and even louder laughter, with occasional running and squealing, until... I think until close to 2am.

Our bedroom got hotter and hotter. A damp blanket of still hot air stifled me as I tried to relax and go to sleep. When the neighbors shut up for a few moments, I could hear rats squeaking outside in our garbage. Which - and this is the other thing that made yesterday awful, and today doesn't look any better - hadn't been picked up when it was supposed to on Tuesday evening, and had continued to fester in the 100-degree heat ever since because the city kept swearing that they'd send a solid waste truck by any minute so we should leave it on the curb. So every time the human party waned I could hear a rat party on the sidewalk.

In my weird half-asleep, half-awake, intolerably uncomfortable state my worry about Alex started to balloon out of control. I thought about children trapped in hot cars. I thought about elderly people in Chicago dying in a heat wave because they couldn't open their windows. I started to seriously believe that there was a chance that the heat could kill her - not to such an extent that I woke her up and drove her to an air-conditioned motel, but to enough of an extent that any chance of restful sleep for myself was hopeless.

Around 1am it became so intolerably hot that Michael hammered open one of our stuck-shut front windows. (Our only bedroom window that opens easily had the air conditioner in it, naturally.) I opened the tiny bathroom window at the other end of the house in a feeble attempt to create a cross-breeze. The bedroom was still sweltering. I went up to check on Alex. Her room wasn't any hotter than ours, at least. She was breathing. Her hair was damp with sweat, but her skin was a normal temperature. I tried to ratchet my anxiety down a little.

At 2am I got up and called BGE again. Now they gave an estimated power restoration time of 5am. I began to worry about our refrigerator and freezerfull of food, as well as our own survival, our utter exhaustion, and Alex. But shortly after that - maybe around 2:30? - a cool-ish breeze sprang up, and I was able to get a solid couple of hours of sleep.

I awoke at 4:30 because the air conditioner coughed itself into action. Michael went downstairs and turned off the TV and the ground floor air conditioner, but when I asked him about the refrigerator he said he had been too sleepy to check it. So I got up and went downstairs, and was relieved to find the meat still quite cold to the touch and the frozen food rock-solid. I listened at the foot of the attic stairs to be sure that Alex's air conditioner had re-started (it had), and went back to bed for a few more hours of broken sleep.

What. A. Night. And I don't think I really stopped worrying about Alex entirely until we finally woke her up this morning. And they still haven't picked up our goddamned trash. The bags had holes chewed all over them this morning - I didn't dream the rats squeaking.

I don't know how people managed, in the years before air conditioning. I really don't. Now I understand why Washington DC was considered a hazardous posting for foreign diplomats, and why cities would be emptied, in the summer, of everyone who could possibly afford to go anyplace else. I guess we would've had awnings, and a better ventilation plan, and maybe a sleeping porch in the shaded back of the house. And certainly we wouldn't have had windows that couldn't be opened in the summer. Because Oh. My. God.

Comments

[ailsaek.livejournal.com]

Sleeping porches, definitely. And cross-ventilation is a good thing too. If we ever build a house, a sleeping porch is going to be involved. Also, I think you acclimate more if there's no AC in the first place.

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

I'm glad you're ok and the power is back on. As for 'how did people manage'...

- Cities weren't as hot as they are now. We're doing a lot of things that will heat them up (tarmac, airconditioning) and nothing that cools them down.

- You can get three or four degrees by running water through open channels; I've been to a city where that works.

- I've never had airconditioning in my life. The warmest place I've lived in had highs of 32 or 33 C - and that was perfectly acceptable, as it would happen only occasionally, and I know people in places like Darwin (where it gets up to 36 and humid) who cope. Fans, draughts, and lots of water are the key.

[curiousangel.livejournal.com]

Actually, the windows in our bedroom aren't especially difficult to open. The house has shifted a little, so it does require a couple of firm upward thwacks with the heel of the hand, but they will open after that. We've got chairs and stuff in front of them, so they aren't easy to get to.

I called the city's "311 - Your One Call For City Services" number today, and got the runaround again. The operator that I spoke with marked it as "followup call made", and said, "Someone should be out today -- call back if they haven't been there by 7 pm", which happens to be close to the time normally scheduled for the next pickup. He couldn't offer anything better, and neither could his shift supervisor, who I demanded to speak to. I called the Mayor's Office, and was told they'd check into it, but they didn't think it was possible to get a same-day pickup arranged.

I said, "Screw this nonsense", and spent five minutes dragging all the trash around the corner into a big pile near a fire hydrant and the alley that leads to our backyard (coincidentally, the same spot that the guy must have been standing in to see our kitchen window when he decided to break in back in May). There's now a good-sized pile of trash bags back there, but at least it's not in front of our house stinking up the place anymore. I'm planning to vote for anyone besides our current mayor in the upcoming election, and don't plan to be shy about telling anyone why.

[therealjae.livejournal.com]

Yeah, crossventilation is a must if you're going to try to sleep in 85 degree weather without air conditioning. Gah.

-J

[wcg.livejournal.com]

Oh blech.

We had a similar night on Monday, due to the a/c compressor deciding it didn't want to work anymore. Fortunately we got it fixed on Tuesday before the worst of the heat happened. It also helps that we could open windows and run fans. We've had times in the past when there were power outages during hot weather and I know it can get pretty miserable.

[tchemgrrl.livejournal.com]

Under similar conditions, I usually get a damp washcloth and put it on whatever part of my torso isn't laying against the bed. It's not the perfect ideal (if it does cool down significantly overnight, you can end up *too* cold), but it's enough to help, and is pretty safe for a little kid, too.

I have near-identical thoughts ("how did people LIVE like this") when walking to the grocery store in Wisconsin, in January.

[timill]

That's what your punka-wallah is for...

[von-krag.livejournal.com]

Putting in a backup genny might be a partial answer. I've seen some setups put together for under 1.5K that use city natural gas as fuel, or a but cheaper if you use gas or propane. Living up here in Minnesota makes yah tink about dat, yah bettcha! :-)

[ailbhe]

Linnea's first summer, the coolest room in our house didn't go below 28C / 82F; most rooms were 32C / 90F at night.

We live in England, so have no air conditioning. We kept the skylight in the attic open all the time, all the other windows and curtains closed until dusk, and open all night. We closed them as soon after dawn - 4:30 am - as we woke. And we didn't wear much, or use any bedcovers, and she wore only a nappy.

And I spent a lot of time very very worried.

But after the first week we were kind of acclimatised, a bit. It was still too hot, and I didn't go out in the sun, but we could function. Rob had aircon at work, which probably helped the sum total of family energy available. I spent a lot of time in the daytime spraying Linnea with a plant spray.

We bought her a little aircon unit for her first summer in her own bedroom, though.

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

Besides sleeping porches, houses were built with open corridors from front to back and only screen doors on the doorways. Large overhangs to shadow the house, deciduous trees, roll-out awnings.

I was lucky my heat pump died over Easter so it never got very cold and not now when I would have had to go to a hotel. One of the few good things about having my engine slide around in my van is that I've had to stay in most of the week for Code Orange, anyway.

There are a couple restaurants that are close enough to get to that are doing DC Restaurant Week and I'm going to see if their chefs can handle a 40gr protein restriction for the meal (I'll go to lunch, which is $20.07).

I'm glad Alex slept through all that, even if you guys didn't. Kids her age don't really understand why it's so hot all of a sudden.

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

And all the chefs are doing protein-heavy prix fixe menus for the week. I could not eat all the protein, but there's not much else to eat, so not worth going. Hmph.

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

Sympathies!

Since we got our generator, we've never had an outage more than a couple of hours. The reason we have a generator is that hurricane something-or-other knocked our power out in Virginia for a week or two (along with the phone) during the summer. Right at the end of it, one of the big box hardware stores got a shipment of generators, and we bought one, and FEMA reimbursed us for it.

We felt like we were reverting to savagery at times. Hot and grungy, keeping things cool in the freezer with the help of free ice from our local grocery store (they also gave out gallons of bottled water, and we shopped there for the rest of the time we lived there). I used our little propane stove to heat some foods, and to heat up water to do the dishes in. It was pretty nasty.

And of course the stupid apartments in back of us got their power back after a day.

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

Pbbbt! We were without processed clean water for two weeks and power for eight weeks after Typhoon Karen in Guam. I calculated how to make some quonset hut stuff that landed in our yard into a dew- and rain-collector and Dad and I put it on the roof for water and Dad got to grill everyday. Back then, the candle wax didn't evaporate, it melted, so we made new candles by melting the wax and pouring it into juice cans with string in the middle. Fortunately, it rains at least once a day in Guam, so people tended to just stand outside and wash up as much as possible.

Mother made it all seem like an adventure.

[jenett]

I'm living without AC again, and am relearning all the tricks. (I grew up in a house in Boston which was white stucco, and where my parents had an air conditioner in their bedroom, but there wasn't anything in the rest of the house until I was into my teens, and pointed out that it was rather unfair for them to be comfortable, and me to not be, when I actually spent far more time in my room.

I'm managing this summer (which has had a couple of days where the heat index was within a few degrees of 100, and a bunch where we've been in the 90s (though not for more than a few days at a time, for a change), and a couple of nights where we didn't get below 75. It's the last one I find really painful.

I also spent last summer in a house with few opening windows, problems with the screens, and a non-functioning AC (there was much annoyance with the landlord, but not so much fixing.) where the house got to and stayed in the mid-90s inside for a week at a time, twice.

My plan this summer has been to spend the hot part of the days somewhere with AC (school, mostly), and to work with cross ventilation, setting my bedroom fan to extract hot air during the day, and venting the place thouroughly when I can get a cooler breeze in the evening.

There's also the trick that if you can get *any* air flow, a very lightweight cloth (I use a very light cotton sari-weight shawl) damp but not dripping. Place it over your bare skin (I prefer arms and shoulders) and get yourself in whatever breeze you can. You will actually feel substantially cooler. It's been enough for me to get to sleep and stay there, the few bad nights we've had.

I do worry about my cat, but she's got a few very shady cool places she's been lurking, including the floor above the basement. (I don't want to let her go down there, as it's unfinished, and there are places she might get hurt or trapped, but the floor is the coolest part of the building, and out of any immediate sunlight.)

[iamjw.livejournal.com]

I live without a.c., in an area where it can go up to 40C in the summer. Fortunately, I can open my windows. The trick is, as someone else mentioned, to open them at night then shut up tight during the day.

The other thing that saves me is cold showers. That gets my core temperature down considerably, and I air dry when I come out from it, so it keeps me cool for a while. I would imagine baths would work as well for Alex. A damp cloth also helps to temporarily cool things down, as does running the wrists under cold water.

And your neighbours had the right idea - outside, especially at night, is often cooler and considerably more confortable.

[the-siobhan.livejournal.com]

We sleep in the basement, which is the coolest part of the house. We made it through the 3-day power outage a few years ago with no problems.