Oy, day 3 after Hurricane Beryl and I have little idea what happened in world since Monday.
Power, internet, and to add insult to injury, cell service was out since early Monday for me. I can drive out a bit to get cell service.
Most debris is cleared in my area and some light signals are working. Stores and restaurants with power are crowded.
We have a gas generator but trouble finding gas with lines at most stations. Waited it out and one tank didn't make a full night.
#Beryl
We booked a kennel yesterday for our dogs. 15 year old border collie was STRUGGLING. Mid aged mutt was sleeping through it. Young husky mix was vocal about her displeasure. (Not worried about her physically, but she was driving us nuts.)
Fortunate to get a slot. Go be expensive though.
Few hotels with power are BOOKED. (We checked.) Houston with no AC is hell. How did people live before it?
Finally back with power. We got power Thursday night but cell service was still crappy. Then another storm on Friday knocked us back off for 27 more hours. Cell service got better middle of Friday night. (Ask me how I know. Power outage is hell on your sleep.)
I woke up every time the generator ran out of gas and the fans went off.
We literally just had time to roll up extension cords, put away fans, plug things back, when power was out again.
We didn't touch much of our "hurricane food" since HEB was open later on Monday. Spent a lot of time going there just for updates (there weren't many) and buying sandwiches.
Between that and trips to Home Depot and gas runs (got chippy in gas lines, people got heated) we relished sitting in an AC car for a while.
Others are worse off with some out till 17th further out. We were worse than most but better than many 460K still without power.
There is a reason all the major population centers were in the north before air conditioning became affordable in 60s. Since, the southern cities have grown much faster. (There was a correlation study that showed the inflection point perfectly aligned.)
I grew up in the south without AC. Houses also were built with attic fans, breezeway, screened porches, even "sleeping porches" . We still got hot, but people kept cross flow going.
Can't do that with modern homes. Don't want to really.
"Don't want to" meaning those things were done from necessity. I remember how it was with zero nostalgia to go back.
I LOVED leaving behind frigid winters moving back south from the Midwest. People from the north move here amd complain of the heat. But mostly people just stay inside in the summer here as they stay inside during winter there.
Spring and Fall are our "Summer." Winter is great other than short days (mostly, freezes excluded.)
@S_r_stone dating myself here, but I grew up in southern Arizona and we had an old swampbox cooler. It wasn't too bad, since the humidity was generally pretty low. Although some nights we had to sleep on a tile floor because it was the only cool place in the house!
@VanontheBorder We had one of those as well. Wasn't much better than a fan in high humidity southeast though.
People with attic fans had a regimen of using them to pull in cooler night air, then try to trap it in the heat of the day. But when the low temps are in the 80s too.....
Big shade trees on both sides of the house helped that make the breezes cooler.
If you remember that, you probably remember cars with visor windows to funnel air into the car as it moved.
@S_r_stone ah yes, wing windows!
@S_r_stone I was more used to heat when I lived in El Paso w no air conditioning. Everyone has AC now so they aren't acclimated. Plus Houston is humid.
Finally reading responses, yes it is hotter now than "back then" but it was always hot in Houston.
Acclimating? Sorta, but people are dying in this heat. It just isn't "being used to it" like we are less tolerant of the cold than people who live in The North.
And people didn't live as long back in the day. I can't help think cumulative stress didn’t shorten lives of those lived in it constantly.