Hot Spell

I hate to see my power bill this month. My house is fairly efficient, but the weather has been hotter than the devil's poker. It's hard to imagine a time before air conditioning.
When we were growing up, we lived in a house with lots of windows. The old homeplace sat under huge sycamore and cottonwood trees so the direct sun rarely touched the roof but it still got hot in August. We had a big ol' window fan that was in the north window of our living room. Unlike today's fans which are made from light weight metal with plastic blades, our fan was made from heavy gauge steel with steel blades that looked like an airplane propeller. It weighed just slightly less than our refrigerator and had what looked like a washing machine motor with a fan belt on it which spun the big blades. If you made the ill advised decision to poke you hand in the back of that fan, it would lash off your arm at the elbow before you could say Captain Hook. I stood outside the window many times and let the air blow in my face. That baby generated enough wind to blow the hair piece off a used car salesman.
All our beds were situated close to the windows which were raised about two inches. Old faithful would suck the cool night air in through the opened windows and keep us cool enough to require a thin blanket even on the warmest nights.
Last summer when it got really hot and we paid a hefty power bill, I mounted a campaign to get one of those big old window fans to fight the heat and save on power. Jilda said "well honey, if you want to sleep under a fan, there's a ceiling fan out on the porch, you can sleep out there." So that's about as far as that campaign went.
I think most of the bad hot weather is behind us now but I do hate to see the bill when it comes in next week. If any of you feel obliged to help, just click on the pink pig icon over to the right :)