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Coping with this Extreme Heatwave
Two winters ago, on a cold and windy day, I took the AC bits out of my upstairs bedroom window and closed the window all the way. In the spring, the window wouldn’t budge. (It’s one of those old windows that are foggy from air caught in the center, so someday I’ll hire professionals to replace it.) I moved the portable AC across the hallway to the sewing room and bought one of those tiny Arctic Air boxes, which I set up in my bedroom, directed toward the bed. Last summer, that was sufficient.
This summer climate change is already glaringly obvious. And alarming. When I moved to Oregon, summer was sunny but… the temperatures in Portland were typically in the seventies and eighties and only reached the 90s briefly in August.
Not so anymore.
The high for today is expected to be somewhere between 111 and 115 degrees. That would be normal… if this were Phoenix, Arizona! Yesterday was bizarre enough at 103 degrees. Since it’s the weekend, I’m not heading to the coast, because everyone headed to/is heading to the coast.
Last night I lay my sleeping bag on the floor of the sewing room (which now contains the AC). To get up and down, I piled two regular pillows and pressed my (genetically bad) knees down on them. The wooden floor was hard under the sleeping bag where I didn’t have pillows.