Brooklyn, NY, USA

[rosefox]

It's been beastly hot here, and the air quality is atrocious. In the late afternoon I took a short walk to the store, no more than a mile there and back, in one of my most lightweight masks and a cotton t-shirt and shorts, and by the time I was home I was short of breath and had literal rivulets of sweat running down my back. It wouldn't feel so bad in the shade, even a little breezy, and then I'd step out into full sun and feel the heat of it smack me in the chest like a physical force. Our air conditioners are struggling and we have a family policy of only running the washer/dryer and dishwasher overnight so we don't add to the daytime load on the power grid. Really looking forward to Thursday's promised thunderstorms.

Comments

[acelightning]

Dear gods. My ancestors came from places where Vikings commonly pillaged the villages, so I have no genes for heat tolerance. I've experienced natural menopause and a hysterectomy. And I now have congestive heart failure, and the stroke I had two years ago affected my thermoregulation. (I am now capable of feeling cold, not that I've felt it since six months ago.)

If I'm too warm while I'm sleeping, I wake up with a lot of the things I have to measure (blood sugar, blood pressure, pulse rate) exceeding the numbers the doctors demand of me. When this hot spell began, the air conditioner in the bedroom was barely able to get the temperature down to 20 Fahrenheit degrees less than the outdoor temperature. When it's 90 outside, it's only 70 inside, which is still way too warm. We happen to own two identical window air conditioners, one of which was in the dining room, where it got very little use. So we swapped it with its twin from the bedroom. It's a whole lot more comfortable when I'm sleeping now. But I know that I'm not going to be able to get consistently comfortable until around Samhain...