Burning

The whole "living without AC" thing has been going pretty well. It's been hot, but we have been favored with many clouds, good amounts of rain, and many clouds. A body cannot appreciate overcast days until you have to endure a good handfull of Florida Sunny ones with NO AC. I'm tellin' you, the days when the sky is clear, the girls and I roast. It's burning hot, for serious!

So, yesterday was one of those days. Burning. Hot. We endured. And roasted. And sat a lot in front of the fan. And steamed. Seriously hot. Even with 21 foot ceilings in the main living area it is seriously hot. Lately our general area has been experiencing record highs. Yeah. I know. Seriously not cool given our circumstances. But we have been favored (please re-read above if you're not sure how we could be favored whilst living without AC).

I think yesterday I wasn't feeling so grateful. And so, the Lord showed me how it could be worse. (I'm pretty sure I was feeling sorry for myself in the burning heat and feeling like it couldn't get worse.) Well, it did. You see, even during the hottest days of not-a-cloud-in-the-sky and/or no rain, we have the cooler nights to look forward to. It generally gets mostly comfortable by around midnight. Which, because of Jessie's work schedule, is usually when we're going to bed (even though I totally want to fall asleep by 9pm every night lately!).

So, last night, Jess and I were in bed by midnight. Yeay! We weren't up any later! I fell asleep quickly, for me, but woke with a bit of a start right at 1am. I felt super confused. Why did I wake up? What was wrong with my environment? Cause I knew there was something amiss. And then I knew: the fans were not rotating. It was burning hot - already. I'm sure the electricity was off a total of 1-2 minutes. Within that time ALL of us were awake. Ria and Kat to use the toilet, Tea, Jess, and me because it was just THAT dang hot. Tea was screaming in discomfort. Jess and I were snappy. Not a nice night.

The electricity did not come back on until 5:07am. I know the exact time because I checked my phone (THANK YOU EVES!! the one I rolled over in the van gave up the ghost, at least with my SIM card in it, a week ago!) when I felt the fan begin to blow on me.

Between 1am and 5:07am I woke up at least 4 times to spray myself with water from my haircutting spray bottle (just water, of course). Poor Jess had to get up for work within 2 hours after the electricity came back on. During the time of the outage, he got up at least as many times as I did. He got wet fabric and wiped our girls off and tried to make them more comfy as well as himself. Since I'd been kicked out of bed by Tea, I didn't know any of that until this afternoon.

Even if I had known, I don't know that the story would be much different. Jess is a MUCH better night-time parent of older than 1 year olds than I am. Our children are completely and totally my responsibility from birth until around 13-18 months old. After that Jessie takes over and does a bang-up job! It's really a lot less intense if you remember that night nursing requires between 6 and 8 wakings when exclusively nursing and planning to do so for two years. At least, that's the way it's been for me. And that 6-8 times only decreases at around 10 months old - but even then the nursing wakings are between 4 and 6 times per night. Anyway, thankfully Tea slept a while after Jess left for work and then all our girls got along quietly for a while, so I got a bit more sleep than he did.

So, living without AC is really not all that bad. Living without fans... now THAT would be hellacious. Seriously problematic! Thankfully, as a result of the fine-tuning of our electricity consumption, we've been able to reduce our electric bill just below the budget allowance and I'm hopeful we can get it even a little bit lower since we're turning off our water heater daily. We'll see!

The point is, it's working... this whole living without AC. It's endurable AND it's helping our finances. Difficulty in the short-term... sacrifices and all, so that later in some unforeseeable future time, we can maybe have things a bit easier AND have no debt to worry about! So, as long as we can run the fans, it's working. ^_^