It’s Now Official

Earlier this week we called the official beginning of summer.

Yes I realize that summer doesn’t begin until the 21st of June, but when we have to bring out the big monster black fan……

At that point, break out the sprinkler’s, the bathing suits and the slip and slide. Summer has begun.

About 4 years ago we bought this amazing fan.

Seriously, AMAZING!

It basically creates a hurricane force wind tunnel and woe be to whatever pieces of paper you might have left lying around. They have just been blown over into Alberta.

It was amazing and totally saved our lives on many hot and stagnant summer nights.

See, our house is particularly bad because even though the sun hits it’s zenith around 2-4pm in the afternoon and then outside typically starts to cool off…..that is only the starting point for the fiery pit of hell that our house becomes. We have a clay tile roof and while it keeps our house nice and cool until just after noon…..by noon it has started to absorb ALL of the heat of the sun and it just gets hotter and hotter and hotter and hotter. In the evening, there is a significant temperature difference between the outside temps and the temps inside the house. The house being so unbearably hot that all you want to do is get into a tub filled with ice until you start to turn blue.

Any way, we bought this fan and it was worth EVERY. SINGLE. PENNY. that we paid for it.

Problem was that we also had a 3-4 year old boy who loved to experiment….and those “normal human filters” that gently suggest that you should not do certain things….yah, those weren’t (aren’t always) in place.

So he would try to feed different things through the fan to see what would happen. For example, if you put a small piece of paper through, it would come hurtling out like a bullet. Or if you sprayed water through via a mister bottle, it sprayed water every where….fun, fun, fun! The scary one was when they fed string through the back of the fan and we had to cut it off the motor and from being tangled around the blades…..NOT. SO. MUCH. FUN!

One day when we weren’t paying enough attention, the kids managed to topple the fan over onto it’s back and so where it should have had tons of air that it could suck in through the engine mechanism…it had next to nothing – squishing through the carpet.

Apparently, we left the house and it ran like this for a while and then it QUIT. The engine died and no amount of tinkering (by Jon) could resuscitate the stupid machine.

The summer was almost over and so we just “stuck it out”. The next year we were moaning and complaining about how unbearable hot it was and how did we ever deal with the heat, when we finally remembered that we used to have this fan……..Oh yah – the fan…..

We went out to Canadian Tire and lo and behold, there was another fan exactly like our old one. We were SO excited to bring that thing back home…..

We have now pulled that fan back out of storage and Monday marked the first day that we pulled it out and it has made our place bearable….not amazing, but bearable…..

I can’t help but thinking about what we’ll get to do when we own our own place………we can buy A/C units if we want…..wouldn’t that be heavenly?

What do you do to cool down in the summer months?

Author: Patricia Culley

I'm the ringmaster of my own circus. Just trying to stay one step ahead of the monkeys. View all posts by Patricia Culley