Summer Nights.

The days are getting hotter and the heat is lasting into the evenings and nights, and summer has only begun. I complain every year about how this house of ours seems to retain the heat and there doesn’t seem to be any relief. So we drive off in the morning to our respective jobs and dwell in air conditioned offices by day, and return to our sweltering home by night. Air conditioning doesn’t seem to help the upstairs rooms, and William’s room seems to hold onto the heat most of all.

We’ve discussed a portable air conditioning unit for his room, but there’s nowhere to run the venting… we have shutters on the inside of the window. We talked about a portable evaporative cooler, but we’re not sure that would be effective, because we don’t really have the driest of climates here. We’ve discussed adding an attic fan, or whole house fan… if we do that, we also need to add vents under the eaves of our roof. We’ve discussed adding a second vent to William’s room, because the vent in his room is so ineffective. I’ve thought about a vent booster, but the reviews are mixed. I’ve even thought about switching his room to the guest room and making the guest room his room, but that really wouldn’t solve the issue as the guest room gets hot, too, just not AS hot. We’re now looking into an in-line air duct booster. We run the A/C and the downstairs cools to 71°F, but his room never gets below 80°F. It’s ridiculous. We still haven’t come to a decision, and the days continue to get hotter.

So, in the evenings, since it’s cooler outside than inside, we take ourselves outside. We eat dinner on the patio, and listen to the birds chattering from their home in the enormous bougainvillea plant in the cul-de-sac behind our home. The neighborhood dogs bark in the distance relaying their important messages to each other. We joke with our neighbor when he comes outside into his backyard. The new fencing our association put in is taller than the previous fencing, so we can’t see him, which adds an extra funny element to our conversations.

We find ourselves going on bike rides. The shadows slant long through the Eucalyptus trees and dust from the bike trail swirls up as we ride along. We nod or smile at the others who are going the other way on the trail.

We take ourselves to the beach for some sand and water play.

And we welcome summertime. Because, really, what else can you do?