Sweltering Heat

I know, I really have no right to complain. Beyond living in SoCal, I live 1.4 miles from the beach, making it even milder, cold by potato standards for most of the year, but beautiful by most others' standards. Hey, the marine layer keeps it gray at least until noon and then starting from about 5 PM for about 9 months of the year.

However, we have this HUGE skylight in our place. 44-3/4" x 68-1/4", to be exact. Most of the time, it's great. We have very few windows, so it allows in a nice amount of natural light. When you look up, you see a little bit of palm tree and pretty sky. It also has this greenhouse effect on that half of our place. When it is 80 outside, it's probably at least 90 in our place, with the windows open and all our fans blowing full blast. When it's almost triple digits as it has been the past few days, well, you know it's well into the triple digits inside.

The reason why I know the exact measurements is I set out on a mission to get a piece of board or foam core big enough to become a window covering of sorts. Bear has once tried to tape together pieces of boxes from all our wedding gifts to provide a shield. Alas, the joints were not strong enough, so we scrapped that idea. From past experience on clients' houses, I know the covering solutions for skylights are either cheap and crappy or decent and very expensive. This is a rental. I wasn't about to invest in either of the above options and neither was our landlord. So foam core it was.

We measured only once. We went to the local, totally awesome by the way, art store. I had them cut it a little bigger (2 inches in each direction), since we had only measured once. I could always cut it down with my mad knife skills, yo. I felt glad that I didn't pay to learn how to and get paid to make models out of foam core for nothin'. I could put them to practical, every day use!

We drove my Camry. It didn't fit. We didn't think of this before we left. We brought the bear's truck back. It barely fit. Two very carefully measured cuts later, I thought we were in business. One fitting later, we were SHORT an inch, dangit. One lengthy re-gluing and cutting session later, we were sort of in business, and I was done. That's what you see above. Now we just need to pray that the extreme heat will not melt the glue I used, or else we will come home to a crumpled piece of $26 foam core. That will be a sad, sad day.

Wow, I'm blabby tonight. Time to go half cuddle with + half push the sticky bear away while watching the USC game. Or maybe I should finish opening those gifts and get started on the thank you cards. Nah.