In a surprise to relatively few of us, at least here in this hemisphere, it’s summertime again.

Your Daily Lex.

Listen, there’s plenty to debate about whether you’d rather be hot or cold.

In general, if I had to choose, I’d rather be cold because there’s easier things to do if you need to get warmer.

You can put on a blanket or whatever, a sweater, something.

But when it’s hot, man, there’s a finite amount of clothes you’re allowed to remove.

I have a nice home office in a nice house that has central air.

We’ve got multiple zones of air conditioning, but my office stays hot when the door is closed, which it is when people are home.

It gets hot.

There’s computer equipment and it’s a room that’s closed in.

To get the office to be cooler sometimes, I would need to cool the whole first floor more than is necessary.

What I’d love to do is get maybe a ductless air conditioner for this room, or just a standard window unit.

The problem is my office happens to face the front of the house, and I think that those things are ugly.

A window unit is ugly.

A ductless air conditioner would have to have its outside the house part, and I think that could be ugly.

I don’t really know how to cool my office off better.

It’s not miserable.

What I use right now is an air cooler.

The air cooler is, in this case, at least a tall tower-shaped giant fan that, in addition to being a fan, has a reservoir that you can fill up with water, water with an ice pack, water with ice cubes, whatever.

It really does a great job.

It points right at me.

It’s quiet enough that I’m using it right now as I record this podcast, and you can’t hear it.

People don’t hear it on phone calls or Zoom calls or whatever.

It’s good, but it’s not an air conditioner, and it’s got to point right at me.

If it’s more than a couple feet away, then I don’t feel enough of its impact.

I don’t think that a front-facing air conditioning unit of some sort would be hideous, but it’s not great, because it is right by the front door.

You can get these things where it’s like, oh, it’s an air conditioning unit that’s on wheels where you have its exhaust tube or condensate tube.

You can have that, and it goes out your window, and then you can remove it and remove the little part that you’re sticking into your window frame when it’s not in use, but that seems like a disaster.

I think you wouldn’t move all summer long.

If you were going to use it five days a week during the summer, you’re going to want it there, so I don’t know.

I keep using the cooler.

Like I said, the cooler does the job.

It’s just, here’s the real problem.

The cooler can get gross.

All that ever goes in it is water, but I guess because it’s sucking in air from the outside and running it through and whatever, it can get gross, and it’s a giant pain to clean.

I do clean, and I clean it pretty obsessively, because before I realized that this could happen and that it would need cleaning, eventually I went in there to top up the water, and it was gross in there.

It was brown.

I was like, oh, that must be from the oxidation process.

I don’t know.

I had no idea, but it’s really just from there’s a tiny little filter in there, and as a thing that sucks in air, it can also, I guess, suck in dirt and dust and whatever else, and over time that can get the water gross.

Sometimes I clean out the giant tank, which is super hard to remove until I learn the trick.

I don’t know what I’m talking about, but you can clean out the tank with just water.

You can do soap and water.

You can do vinegar.

You just don’t want any of those things left over when it’s running and in use again.

I think I’ve gotten to a good place.

It’s not as convenient as an air conditioner, but it works.

I don’t know.

If you have great ideas on how to keep my office cooler, you let me know.

Again, because it is summer, I’ll note that as I mentioned on Mastodon this week, I’ve already killed two wasps.

My dad has texted me about this, having seen that post on Mastodon, I guess, saying I should get an exterminator because if there’s wasps in the house, that’s a big problem.

Since I know he listens to this podcast, instead of answering his text, I’m answering in podcast form first to say those wasps were ones that got into the house when people left the door open for too long coming inside.

These are not inside wasps.

We do have exterminators to come four times a year, I think, at a minimum.

I’d be happy to have them out again, but there are not wasps living inside the house.

They simply got into the house from doors being open.

Happy summer.

Anyway, it’s a beautiful Thursday here in central New Jersey.

I hope it’s beautiful wherever you are.

Honestly, just by virtue of your presence, it is.

I really mean that.

Bye.

Best of SWGSX.