Squishy surgery recovery, and: home improvements, oh boy.

The recovery: As I mentioned last week, I had carpal tunnel and trigger finger surgery on my right hand on September 11. The stitches came out this past Monday. Everything looks good (I'm sparing you a pic, "good" being a relative term), but I have to wear the wrist brace part-time for another week, and then only with heavy activity for another four weeks. Also for the next week, I'm not supposed to do any pushing, pulling, or lifting of anything heavier than a cup of coffee (actually what the PA said was that the weight limit was five pounds -- I didn't ask where he gets his mugs). So it probably wasn't a good idea for me to vacuum and mop the Saltillo tile floors today, but they were too gross to let it go another week, thanks to the construction project I'll get to in a sec.

The other thing I'm supposed to be doing is exercising my right hand by squeezing something three times a day. He said a stress ball would work, or a rolled-up towel if I didn't have a stress ball. "No worries," I said. "The towel won't be necessary." 

Part of the collection. I have more at the office.
Lynne Cantwell 2026

He's lucky I didn't start listing them.

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Home improvements, oh boy: It was just last summer that I was explaining here on the blog about swamp coolers and how well they work for cooling here in the Southwest, including in my apartment, which has never had any sort of whole-house cooling because 40 years ago, Santa Fe would get maybe two 90-degree days a year.

I'm now eating my words, because this summer was brutal. This was the hottest summer ever recorded in Santa Fe. We had 63 days where the official daytime temperature reached at least 90 degrees, with two days in August hitting 98. It was also really dry this summer. And because the water tanks on the swamp coolers only hold enough for about four hours of cooling, I couldn't leave them on all day when I was at work, or leave the house for more than four hours. So I'm having a mini-split system installed.

Because my condo building is such a unicorn, it is taking the installers way longer than normal to put the thing in. The initial estimate was two to three days; tomorrow starts week two. It doesn't help that the monsoons have finally kicked in, which means no outside work when it starts thundering. I'm not complaining about their safety, or about the rain, which we need (we're in "exceptional drought" status). I just, y'know, want to have my cake and eat it, too.

One advantage of getting the mini-split installed, besides not dying from the heat, is that it's a heat pump system. So I'll be able to get rid of some or all of the electric baseboard heaters in this place. I need to lose at least one because the mini-split system will need one of those breakers. Mini-splits are supposed to be much more efficient than baseboard heat, so I'm hoping my electric bill will go down, despite adding A/C. Stay tuned.

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Alert hearth/myth readers know that I am constantly looking for ways to further gussy up the condo. So to take my mind off the installers making construction racket while I was working at home this week, I started thinking about a replacement for the perfectly serviceable ceiling fixture in the kitchen. The fixture that was there when I bought the place got damaged in the aftermath of the second flood, so I picked up the cheapest possible LED fixture at Walmart and paid an electrician to put it in for me. It works fine, but it's doing zero for the room style-wise. So I went spelunking online for flush mount ceiling fixtures that would work with my Southwestern boho vibe.

I ran into the same thing I always run into: "boho" gets you stuff draped with strands of white beads; "rustic" gets you stuff with pine cones and fake antlers; "Southwest" gets you Kokopelli. Add "copper" to the search parameters (to go with my cabinet pulls, etc.), and you end up with ugly industrial-style stuff, or else "modern farmhouse", which I'm told is on the way out. Add "blue", and you get nothing at all. 

I've settled on this one for now. (Maybe I can spray-paint the base antique copper.) I'll wait to order it until the mini-split saga is over. At least swapping out a single light fixture will be quick and easy. 

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

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.

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

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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.

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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.

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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

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