War in Iran, and keeping cool in the Southwest.

I was all set to do a 100 percent nonpolitical, totally educational post this week about how I'm not gonna die because of the lack of air conditioning in my condo. And then yesterday, Trump went and dropped a bunch of BOMBS on Iran. (His quirky capitalization, not mine.)

In some respects, we all should have seen this coming. The guy's been itching to play with our arsenal since his first term, when he asked whether nuking a hurricane would work. (Spoiler: No. And also, WTF?)

He also probably thinks he's brilliant for misdirecting his critics with his never-gonna-happen "two weeks" excuse and then striking almost right away. 

Here's what I know: No matter what anybody in the Trump regime claims, it is way too early to know how badly, or even whether, Iran's nuclear capability was damaged. Third-party inspectors would need to be granted access to the bombing sites to evaluate the damage, and good luck getting the Iranians to agree to that now. (I'm feeling echoes of Bush the Younger's bombing runs on Iraqi targets that were supposed to be chemical weapons sites; one may have been a baby-milk factory, but it definitely wasn't a munitions plant.)

Here's what else I know: The Iranians will retaliate. We don't know how yet, but they will. 

As a commenter on some article I read somewhere observed, the United States is now Japan in 1941. And we all know how that turned out for Japan.

***

Anyway. I refuse to let Trump derail my original plan. So here's an explainer about my A/C-free condo.

***

I have always had a hard time equalizing the indoor temperature in this place. I'm not in an end unit, so I only have windows on the north and south sides. The south side has four ginormous solar windows that don't open - I have often referred to them as the fabulous wall o' windows -- and a door to the deck. There's also a mysterious circular thing that looks like a fan cover in a side wall at the top of the solar windows. On the north side of the house, there are three smaller casement windows, two in the bedroom and one in the office/craft room. This window placement is the classic arrangement for passive solar design. The idea is to capture the heat from the sun in the building's materials (including the brick floor in my living/dining room) on the south side of the house and let it keep the house warm all night long. That works great in the winter. And it did work pretty well in the summer, here at 7,000 feet and almost 40 years ago, until climate change started giving us warmer summers. Today, for me, the living/dining room has been ten degrees warmer than the back of the house in every season.

Of course, you can regulate the sun's intensity by putting a shade on any window. And my solar windows did have shades on them -- dark brown shadecloth-type fabric that you had to pull up from the bottom, even though (as I've explained to several window-shade sellers) the sun, which you're trying to block, comes in at the top. (There's also an exterior roller shade, also in a dark brown shadecloth-type fabric, that I leave down all summer.) The living/dining room temperature can easily exceed 85 degrees on a summer day without any intervention.

Here's my first line of defense: an evaporative cooler, also known as a swamp cooler. 

Lynne Cantwell 2025

The bottom part is a water tank. There's a submersible pump inside that pumps water to the top of the unit and sends it trickling down over a honeycomb-cardboard pad that's maybe two inches thick in the back of the unit. The water saturates the pad; the fan in the front pulls hot air through the wet pad and sends it out into the room, where the water in it evaporates, cooling the room. It's a stupid simple technology that has been around at least since the time of the pharaohs. It's also cheap compared to air conditioning. The tank holds about four gallons of water, which lasts for about four hours. A ten-minute shower uses about 20 gallons of water, or about five refills of this device. As for electrical usage, it's just like running a fan.

Note, though, that a swamp cooler only works in dry climates. If you tried running one of these in the humid mid-Atlantic, it wouldn't work -- the air there is already saturated with moisture. You'd just make yourself more miserable.

Okay, but what about a mini-split? I had a guy come out to the house a couple of months ago to advise me about that, and he suggested that I get the exhaust fan at the top of the solar windows (for so the mysterious circular thing has turned out to be) hooked up again. So I did that, and it's helping a lot. The exhaust fan not only pulls out the hot air that gets trapped at the top of those windows, but it also pulls the cooler air through from the back of the house. For the first time since I moved in, the bedroom temperature is within a degree or two of the living/dining room temperature.

I've made one more adjustment: I got rid of the dark brown interior shades and had fancy light-colored honeycomb shades installed in their place. It turns out that those dark shades were actually soaking up heat and holding it in the room; lighter-colored shades reflect heat. That should have been obvious to me, but it wasn't. It also should have been obvious to whichever previous owner had them installed -- but my money is on it being the same genius who had the exhaust fan unhooked.

Anyhow, as I write this on Sunday at 2:30 pm, it's 82 degrees outside with 15 percent humidity. I've got the shades drawn and the exhaust fan and the swamp cooler running. Just for fun, I put a thermometer in front of the swamp cooler. They're about 30 inches apart.

Lynne Cantwell 2025

TL;DR: I'll be fine.

***

The swamp cooler covers about 500 square feet. My condo is about 1,000 square feet, so I have two -- one in the living/dining room and one in the bedroom. You can hook them up to a garden hose, eliminating the need to refill the tank manually, but you're advised to only do that outside -- if you overfill the unit, the water will leak out the back and all over your floor (ask me know I know).

You can get bigger portable swamp coolers, and even whole-house units. The bigger portable units only cover more square footage, though -- they run through the water tank in about the same amount of time. And a whole-house swamp cooler might be harder to manage in a condo building. But if this setup starts to fail, I'll look into alternatives again.

***

I splurged on the shades and got the motorized kind. The old shades were a mess -- the original pulley mechanism at the top had broken off and been replaced with an eyebolt drilled through the top edge. To raise and lower the shades, you used a jury-rigged pole with a bolt assembly sticking at a right angle through the end.

As I watched the installation crew testing the motors on the new blinds, I pointed out the pole to them. One asked if I would like for them to throw it away with my old blinds. 

"Yes, please," I said. 

Tigs is somewhat gobsmacked by the new blinds.
Lynne Cantwell 2025

***

These moments of comfortable blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay cool!

Aliens vs. gods: who to believe in?

I was pretty disappointed by my Facebook friends earlier this week. I saw the following meme and shared it: 

No idea who created this, sorry.

"Agreed!" I said. Then I added, "Of course, you could say the same thing about the gods..."

Not a single friend took me up on my snarky comment. 

Several folks said they believe there's life elsewhere in the universe and listed good reasons why we haven't met them yet: the universe is vast and they may be nowhere near us; there's life out there, but it may not be intelligent life (with the usual comments about whether there's intelligent life on Earth); aliens know we're here and they're avoiding us because we're primitive and warlike; and so on. 

But nobody rose to my point. Maybe they thought I was baiting them. Heck, maybe I was.

I'm not suggesting the gods are aliens; Erich von Daniken made a lot of money in the late '60s by popularizing the idea that ancient astronauts built the pyramids, but that hypothesis has been debunked long since. 

I'm also not advocating some version of Pascal's wager -- which, for the record, I think is stupid. You're familiar with it, right? It purports to use logic to convince people to believe in the Christian God. If God is real and you believe, the argument goes, you win eternal life; but if God isn't real, yet you act like He is, then you've lost nothing but gained a good life.

It's the "you've lost nothing" part that I have trouble with. If I go against my sincerely held beliefs, I have indeed lost something -- my integrity. Is that the sort of "believer" Jehovah wants in heaven -- a person who will say anything to get that eternal reward? I don't think so.

Anyway, that wasn't my point with the alien meme. My point was that there are people who have never seen an alien, but are willing to entertain the idea that they exist. Yet because they disagree with Christianity, they think anybody who believes in any god is irrational. 

Humans on earth have no material evidence for the existence of either gods or aliens -- but while it's okay to believe that alien life might be out there, it's nuts to believe the same thing about the gods.

I dunno. Just seems irrational to me.

***

As a reward for tolerating my little thought exercise, I'm giving you pictures of my cat.

Tigs is weird about plants. He doesn't nom the leaves or the flowers; instead, he gnaws through the stems. I learned this the hard way right after I adopted him. He went after some roses so hard that he knocked the vase over and it broke. (Before somebody asks: no, roses aren't toxic to cats.)

So for Valentine's Day, I got him a bunch of those little spray roses. (I also stuck them in a brass vase so he couldn't knock it over and break it.) 

Things began innocently enough: 

Lynne Cantwell 2023

But then: CRRUNCHHH! 

Lynne Cantwell 2023

That was Tuesday. He's been at them all week. I got a final shot of the carnage tonight. 

Lynne Cantwell 2023

I guess I need to get him some more.

***

These moments of destructive blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe!

Let's get crafty again.

I am fresh out of new ideas for a post this week, so maybe it's a good week for an old idea. How about a crafty post?

This one won't be as varied as the one I did in November, when I had refinished a table top, among other things. But I've finished a couple of projects since then, and I'm working on a couple more.

First up: weaving. You may recall that I made four matching cushions for my dining room chairs and that I had enough yarn left over to make a table runner. I did get the table runner done -- and as soon as it came off the loom, Tigs, claimed it. 

Lynne Cantwell 2022

Don't worry -- I got it away from him and onto the table. And as you can see, it does match the cushions. 

Lynne Cantwell 2023

On to knitting. I'd had a scarf pattern called Gridlock in my Ravelry queue for more than ten years, so I figured it was time to make it. Except I don't wear scarves anymore; I prefer cowls these days -- they're just easier to deal with. So I converted the scarf pattern into a cowl pattern. 

Lynne Cantwell 2022

I have enough yarn left over from this project to make a hat to match -- and I started it, but then realized I hadn't cast on enough stitches for the cable repeat, so I frogged the whole thing and started over. I've made progress since then, but it's been set aside for several weeks in favor of another knitting project: a holiday-themed afghan. Here's what that's supposed to look like when it's done: 

image stolen from favecrafts.com

This pattern has been around for approximately a million years. It was originally a free pattern from Bernat, but the yarn they developed it for has been discontinued, and the pattern itself is only showing up on random websites these days. I'll tell you more about this adventure when I'm done, which shouldn't be too much longer now -- I started the final rounds of green around the edge last night.

That brings us up-to-date. Hopefully I'll have something more scintillating to talk about next week.

***

These moments of fibery blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe!

Spanish Colonial me.

I promised y'all last week that I would post a photo of my rebozo when I was finished weaving it. Alert hearth/myth readers will recall that the rebozo is part of my costume as an interpreter at El Rancho de las Golondrinas, a living history museum here in Santa Fe. 

Lynne Cantwell 2022

Well, it's done. This week, I fixed a few blips in the weaving and washed it. I realized y'all would probably want to see the whole costume, though, as it's a whole lot more interesting than just seeing a long, rectangular piece of cloth. So here you go, and please excuse the unmade bed in the background that I only kinda sorta managed to crop out. 

Under the rebozo, I'm wearing a peasant top. It's from Lands End, and drapier than it should be -- I thought it was mostly cotton when I ordered it, but it turns out it's a blend of cotton, modal, and -- whoopsy! -- spandex. The skirt is all cotton. There's a sash that's hard to see in the photo -- I'll get to that in a minute -- and you almost can't see the shoes at all, which is a good thing because they're brown suede flats and they are not historically appropriate. The shoes we're supposed to be wearing are called tewa boots. Don't bother googling the term; Mama Google will think you mean boots made by Teva, the shoe manufacturer. I'm a big fan of Tevas, but they don't make anything like the boots that everybody in Northern New Mexico wore in Spanish Colonial times. You can click here to see what the footwear looked like in those days.

Anyway, I'm hoping the rest of the outfit will be sufficiently convincing that nobody will notice that I'm not wearing the right kind of shoes.

Now, about that sash: Surprise! I wove that, too. The yarn is a cotton/linen blend that a friend gave me last year. I decided to attempt to weave a twill pattern for the first time ever. Here's what it looked like on the loom (yes, that's Tigs on the floor, and you don't want to know what he was doing when I took the photo): 

Lynne Cantwell 2022

To make plain weave like the rebozo, you go under one warp thread and over the next, all across the fabric, and then reverse it on the next pass, so that you go over the thread you went under the last time, and under the one you went over. But for 2/2 twill, you kind of think of your warp threads in groups of four. You go under the first two warp threads and over the next two on the first pass; then on the next pass you move over one warp thread, so that you go over one, under the next two, and over the last one, and so on. That's what gives you the diagonal slant. With any luck, you end up with fabrick that looks like this: 

Stolen from https://www.gistyarn.com/blogs/how-to-weave/basic-weave-structures-twill

If the pattern looks familiar, it's because you've seen it on your favorite pair of jeans. Denim fabric is a 2/2 twill.

Anyway, it was an interesting experiment. The end result looks a little rough in some places, but I think it will pass for the costume. Next weekend is my first volunteer gig. I'll let you know how it works out.

***

I had intended to do a split post this week and address the recent rash of mass shootings, particularly the one in Uvalde, Texas, that put the lie to so many of the NRA's talking points. For example, the army of "good guys with guns" in the school parking lot didn't stop 21 people, most of them kids, from being shot to death.

Rather than keeping you, however, I'll point you to an interview I read in Politico earlier today. A couple of researchers have studied a whole bunch of people who committed mass shootings over the past several decades. These researchers have identified a profile that fits such individuals -- one that would make it easier to stop such incidents before they start. The question is whether the political will is there to implement their suggestions, which, for one thing, would require a huge investment in mental health screenings and treatment. So far, the will has not been there; for all the bleating conservatives do about how troubled these individuals are, they are also quick to scuttle any actual funding for mental health treatment. Still, I found it an interesting and balanced read, and I recommend it to you.

***

These moments of balanced blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. The pandemic's not over yet, folks -- get vaxxed and boosted!

I don't care whether you read my books.

First, an apology is in order. You may have noticed that this is Monday night. And as y'all know, I always post on Sunday nights. I have no good excuse for not posting last night -- I stayed out too late, hanging out with friends, and didn't adequately plan ahead of time. I'll try not to do it again. Too often, anyway.

***

I might be losing it. I was cruising Twitter a few days ago, as one does, and I could swear I saw somebody mention something about some authors -- or maybe it was just one author -- who had complained about people who buy their books but never read them. 

Twitter isn't organized -- hashtags were literally invented by users so they could find and aggregate tweets on specific topics -- and while I have a vague idea of whose tweet it was that I saw in response to the original tweet, I can't find any evidence of it. Nor can I think of a hashtag that would cover it. And my Google-fu is failing me, too.

Anyway, let's just pretend this actually happened -- that some clueless author actually complained on Twitter that people were buying their book(s) but not reading it/them. And let me state further that I don't care whether you read my books.

Tigs says you should buy and read the hooman lady's books.
Lynne Cantwell | 2021

I might feel differently if I wrote nonfiction books full of original ideas and earth-shattering truths that would be a huge benefit to society, and published them because I needed the world to understand them so we could all live together in peace and harmony forever, and then...crickets.

But I don't write nonfiction (very often). I write fiction. Specifically, fantasy. More specifically, urban fantasy, and sometimes magic realism. Now, there are fiction writers who use their work to sell a particular philosophy or point of view (Ayn Rand comes to mind). But I'm not one of them. I write stories I would like to read myself. Moreover, even when I've stuck in an intriguing idea or several, I'm not so egotistical as to think everyone must read my priceless pearls of prose. 

The bottom line is I'm here to entertain myself, and by extension, my readers. If you want to buy my books and let them sit on your Kindle unread, I'm okay with that. I get paid either way.

And you can't judge people's motivations for not immediately reading every book they buy. One reader told me the other day that she's probably going to wait to read The Atherton Vampire until the other two books come out, so she can get the whole story at once. I respect that.

Oh, hey, I need to put in a plug for The Atherton Vampire, which is just 99 cents at Amazon through at least the end of this month. Here's the cover again: 

Okay, back on topic. 

I get that some writers have sweated bricks over their books, possibly for years, and it feels like a slap in the face when folks don't or won't read them. But then I think back on my twenty-year career in broadcast journalism and all the priceless pearls of prose I wrote for myself and others -- all of which have no doubt been bulk-erased long since -- and I just have to shrug. 

I write books now. Once you, Dear Reader, have bought them, it's out of my hands. Read them or not, as you choose. As long as you buy them, I'm good.

***

These moments of bloggy clarification have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Get vaxxed!

Gratuitous kitty photos.

I owe y'all a blog post, since it's Sunday and all. But I don't have much to say tonight, and I'm sure you'd rather just look at pictures of my new kitty anyhow.

So here's Tigger, a.k.a. Tigs, a.k.a. the Tiggenator. He's just shy of four years old and still pretty playful. He's settling in okay; I only caught him hiding on top of the kitchen cabinets for the first few days. Today, I clipped his front claws for the first time. He wasn't happy about it -- there was a lot of growling and complaining -- but I didn't end up bleeding, so I'm calling it a win. And he got treats afterward for Being Such a Good Boy, so maybe he'll let me do it again sometime.

Here he is, trying to be a loaf cat. He needs a little more practice -- gotta get that tail tucked up under him.

Lynne Cantwell 2021

He is much better at helping me knit. Well, actually, what he's good at is keeping me from knitting. Here he's lying on my pattern with his head pillowed on the project itself.

Lynne Cantwell 2021

I bought a tall cat condo so he could see out the living room windows (and also to encourage him to quit jumping up on top of the kitchen cabinets, as if that would work). He was a little leery of that top level, but a spritz of catnip spray took care of his reluctance. 

Lynne Cantwell 2021

And finally, here he is, being his snuggly and adorable self.

Lynne Cantwell 2021

That's it. That's my life right now. Have a great week.

***

These moments of unbelievably adorable blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Get vaxxed!