It's Been Hot!

Its been hot recently here.  95 to 100 degrees most of the time.  93 at 9 in the morning today after a rainy day yesterday.   Good for the tomatoes, I like to say.

Its South Carolina - and not the ocean part - so its not super-unusual for it to be so hot.  But this time, I noticed something that makes a lot of sense to me.

I've always hated air conditioning.  I call it "indoor refrigeration" because that's what it is.  Calling it "air conditioning" makes it sound like something necessary to correct an inherent imperfection in the air.  Anyway,  I hate the way it teaches your own body's cooling systems to get lazy and shrinks the range of climate variables in which we feel comfortable.  I worry that it has unknown health implications.

As someone with a lifelong cringing feeling about excessive indoor refrigeration, the fact that this little epiphany came as I am nearing 50 is a tiny bit startling.  The shift that ended in my little epiphany started on our trip to the Florida Keys this May (Santa was kind).  In the Keys, the distinction between indoors and outdoors is much less clearly defined.  Shade is a wonderful refrigerant. Shade and a breeze and your own human cooling systems can take care of just about everything.  My wife had previously not seen this, holding fast to the assertion that a) I was nuts, and b) without air conditioning, life would not be bearable.

The shift continued when we got home.  We step out of a place with indoor refrigeration into the outside air and she will say "oh, thank God, it was so cold in there".  She'll say, "I didn't even realize how cold it was in there."  We have always kept our indoor refrigeration at our home at 79 (too much colder than that and I would be constantly uncomfortable). As we step into the house from walking the doggies, she used to rejoice getting out of the heat, but she's started to say "Holy crap, its cold in here". After a mere 27 years of marriage, she's coming around to my way of looking at the world.  Its not too hot outside, its too cold inside.

I've always known this, but now that I can articulate it, it has me wondering what other things I have backwards.