06/12/13

Today was the hottest day so far this year. With morning temperatures in the 80s, with a high forecast for the mid-90s, I knew it was time to turn on the air conditioner. While technically this isn't the first time we used it, Andrea used it for a day while I was out of town and she was decorating a cake, its the first time I've used it this year. We ran it for much of the day, then turned it back off this evening, once temperatures began to drop again.

I've had no energy today, and generally have just not felt very well. I'm somewhat suspicious that this may be from using the air conditioner. I know that using the a/c does impact how I feel. It seems that I've been more productive this year than in the past, and I wonder if the not using the a/c is one of the big reasons for that. That's one more reason to build a house that is designed for natural cooling, so we can avoid using a/c completely.

Since it was so hot today, and we were cooling the house artificially, we didn't want to use the oven, which would have just heated it back up. Andrea was wanting to make some bread, so she decided to use the Sun Oven. We bought the Sun Oven at last year's Mother Earth News Fair, but had yet to cook with it, although we had used it for a couple of other tasks. While getting the bread ready to be baked, Andrea decided to go ahead and try baking some potatoes in the Sun Oven. Both the potatoes and bread turned out. Of course they took longer than if we had made them in the gas oven or even on the grill, but that's a minor inconvenience when you consider the amount of fuel we saved.

Andrea also made more ice cream today. This time she made chocolate ice cream with strawberries, which she thought sounded weird, but I thought sounded great. It turns out that I was right. While she was working with the strawberries she went ahead and made some puree to use for making sorbet, and then froze the rest of the berries.

The weather forecast is calling for storms tomorrow, so we spent some time this evening working on shelter for the dogs. They have one dog house, on the front porch, which they share by alternating which of them sleeps in it. The last time it stormed, though, Jack used the dog house the entire time, which meant Luke wasn't sheltered from some of the blowing rain. Since he is scared of storms anyway, specifically thunder, this wasn't a good situation. We decided to clean up the crate that we used when we had to keep Jack contained during his recovery and put it on the porch. Neither of them has been in it since we stopped containing Jack, so they may not voluntarily go in, we aren't sure. We've made a spot for it on the porch, and taken the door off, so hopefully they'll see that they will be able to get out at any time if they do decide to use it.