Just another warm and humid summertime morning coffee muses.

Humidity is a funny thing around here. When you wake up, it’s always high… sometimes pushing 100%. By the middle of the day, as the temperature climbs the humidity usually plummets down to the 50% range, sometimes even lower.

So when I walk out of the 72°, 46% humidity house onto the back porch with it’s 69°, 90% humidity… The back porch feels much warmer. And I’m always surprised. This is an early summer effect because shortly, it’ll always be hotter when I come out… and the humidity will just exacerbate the feeling.

The first bird on the feeder this morning… a blue jay.

There’s a bit of a breeze blowing this morning. Not enough to make the fans unnecessary, but enough to move the tree leaves around.

We’re far enough into summer down here that almost all of the leaves in the trees have taken on the deep green of summer. Looking around the horizon, I only see a couple of lighter greens in existence. These darker greens will last thru the summer if we get a reasonable amount of rain. If the rains fail… those lighter greens will return as the leaves dry out.

Cicadas hum…

Sitting here in front of this fan brings back memories of summer nights when I was growing up. That was pre air conditioning. Our house was cooled by what we called an attic fan. To those in the know it was a whole house fan. It was located in the ceiling of the central hallway. It was about three feet square and moved a lot of air. In thru the windows, out thru the attic. It worked best overnight. Sleeping by an open window with the cool night air sucking over your body was enough to chill you.

Of course it wasn’t a perfect solution. You didn’t want it sucking in hot air during the day so you had to turn it off. You would usually turn it back on when the outside temperature fell below what the house had built up to. Had the house been constructed with more thermal mass the system would have worked much better.

Once I married, Sherry and I moved back into that house. Somewhere over time, the fan had been removed. One of the first projects I did was putting in a new updated fan in the same whole in the attic. The new fan came with a variable speed control… what a difference that made. During the day I would turn the speed down to almost nothing and use the fan to keep the attic temperatures down. So much so that the house temperature stayed mostly in the high comfort range. Then when we would get home from work I could crank up the speed, open some strategic windows and cool the house down. The system worked so well that we slept under a comforter all year long.

So much for the trip down memory lane… coffee’s been gone for awhile… catch you later.