Boone makes a new prediction.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20602099&sid=aPJVYrqDqWQs&refer=energy

Eric’s Website

It’s raining in Oklahoma now, temperatures cool but things were quite different earlier this month.  Three days of triple-digit, record breaking heat caused me to think about my childhood in Louisiana.  Summer temperatures were often over one-hundred degrees but we had no air conditioner.  Open windows and a few fans were our means of staying cool.

Staying cool in Louisiana during the fifties and sixties was a relative term.  About the only time you ever felt truly cool was when you were neck deep in water, a place my friends and I tried to be every day.  Our usual afternoon destination was the Vivian Municipal Pool and it was almost always approaching dark before we started home.

I was a freshman in college when my parents purchased their first air conditioner, just enough to cool their bedroom.  None of my college classrooms were air conditioned but my first dormitory room (a new building) was.  After my first night in that dorm room I was permanently spoiled.

I spent almost six months in the boonies of Vietnam.  The heat and the humidity were usually out of sight and only nightly rains provided a respite from the heat.  We drank instant coffee cooked in metal cups over the flame of a heat tab placed in a tin can punched with can opener air holes.  Hey, it kept us cool (at least in our minds) and we called it the radiator effect.

In the French Quarter of New Orleans owners still spray down their trees, plants and bricks with water hoses in the summer.  This method is employed at many courtyard restaurants such as the Court of Two Sisters, a famous restaurant in the Quarter.  The large pen where Velvet, Patch and Lucky stay is well shaded with many trees and I used my own water hose to cool things down tonight.

It’s still in the nineties outside as I keyboard this piece and stare out at the thermometer on the porch.  Am I going to open the windows tonight and relive a part of my misspent youth?  Nah!!  I think I’ll take a cool dip in the pool, all the way up to my neck instead.

Eric’s Website