How to Beat the Heat

If you have no insulation, no money, and no air conditioning, this summer can feel like a very hot and sticky sort of death sentence. It does in our house, anyway!

Hubby came up with a brilliant partial solution... get a few rolls of heavy-duty aluminium foil, and a roll or two of sticky tape, and get to work. About half our windows now have a layer of foil, shiny side out, stuck to them (on the inside surface). He covered roughly half of each 'set' of windows, so we still get daylight.



Cost : About $6

Effort : OK, it's a bit of a pain putting it up, it took a few hours

Downside : We don't have such good views, the house is darker inside, and I haven't had to remove the sticky tape from the windows yet...

BUT

Effectiveness : Noticeably cooler inside for most of the day! PLUS the aliens can't read our minds any more.... ;)

Reader outcry

Well, what do you know. I've caused a real 'reader outcry'. The dear readers of The Sunday Age were so incensed at the loss of their regular crossword, which was replaced with mine, that the paper is dropping my crossword, effective immediately. How fucky is that?

There's still a 6-month contract in place, so they'll be publishing one of my kiddie puzzles on the kids puzzle page instead. But it doesn't have the same weight as a serious crossword. There was I thinking I was getting somewhere. Ooops, I forgot hide-bound readers who don't want anything new.

Where I Knit

This post is for Julie (aka Samurai Knitter) - this is where I knit when I'm at home. The basket next to the chair is my works in progress basket (as opposed to the huge wooden Stash Chest, which is opposite my chair).

My son's fish tank (along with attendant clutter and wirey bits) is next to my chair. You can visit his "Hi Fish!" Blog and make appropriate ooh and aaah noises - it's quite amazing. He also made my nifty little mini table, which I put my cuppa tea on.

Kitchen is right behind me (so I can leap up and rescue forgotten things on the stove, (lie mode) not that I've EVER done that), and twinkly Christmas lights are still hanging from the rafters cos I like em!

Artwork by myself is on the left, and a watercolour painting by my hubby's talented uncle is above my chair.