After a week and a half, the heat wave in the Northwest seems to have finally broken. Thank the literal heavens! I now fully appreciate what it means when an extreme weather event hits a place that isn’t use to it. Very different from when a hurricane hits New York and everyone in New Orleans is like LOL.

When the heat hit Seattle, everyone ran amuck in a sweaty panic and bought up every cooling device for sale in the city. Air conditioner prices on Craigslist went from costing anywhere between, I don’t know, free to $75 and skyrocketed to prices no lower than $350 and as high as $800. In an act of desperation, my boyfriend and I drove an hour and fifteen minutes outside of the city to buy a Vornado fan from a Craigslist vendor.

Like many other neighborhoods in Seattle, our building managers do not allow us to have air conditioners, or anything, sticking out of the window. Luckily, I was able to snag a free window conditioner off Craigslist before the heat hit, which we set up on a table and used duck tape and a metal tube to blow the hot air out.

It was working fine, and then we went on a cruise to Alaska and came back to a 100 degree apartment. The duck tape was all melty soft and our little putt puttin window conditioner wasn’t cooling down a fly. So my boyfriend went to work with cardboard and those car sunshield reflectors and this is what came out of it:

It’s not much, but with a window fan, the Vornado, and a strict window opening and closing schedule, we were able to stay cool enough to play Cards Against Humanity in the evenings without dreaming of death by hypothermia. Great success!