Tag: heat

Sleep With Me Podcast [en]

It’s 11pm. It’s 30 degrees on my windowsill. The cat is dripping off the couch like a Dali watch. I slept all afternoon, because of a short night, and woke up at 8.30pm.

Tomorrow I take my car and go to work. It feels a little unreal, because it’s so hot that Switzerland is turning into a tropical country, and I’m thinking of installing a ceiling fan, and mosquito nets, because even though mosquitoes aren’t a problem now, in a few years they will.

Caught in a mildly dystopian SF short story.

There is a warm breeze that sometimes makes it onto the balcony where I’m writing. Sometimes. Tonight I will sleep with the fan on.

On Wednesday morning I will flee to the chalet, where it’s 10 degrees cooler. I will work from up there. I will sleep. The cats won’t like the commute but I know they’ll appreciate the temperature change too.

The other day I was listening to the episode The Shipping Forecast on the 99% invisible podcast. I like this podcast because it’s super interesting, and also because (paradoxical, I know), I use it to go to sleep when I have a hard time falling asleep. I’m not alone (listen to the episode). It’s a bit annoying because I end up having to relisten to episodes I fell asleep to, but it works really well.

Seems many enjoy falling asleep to the sound of the shipping forecast. Roman Mars does a reading at the end of his episode, and indeed, I was almost asleep by the end. On this episode, he introduced us to Sleep With Me, a podcast designed on purpose to help people go to sleep. I’ve used it a few times and it’s wonderful. I can’t make head or tail of what Drew is talking about, but it works great. The added bonus is that I don’t feel bad about falling asleep in the middle of the story, as that’s what it’s designed for! From a storytelling point of view I’m fascinated by how meandering the narration is. All over the place, just like your brain when it wanders off before pulling the curtains for the night.

If you have trouble going to sleep, whether because of the heat or thoughts running around in your head, I definitely recommend trying it.

 

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Back On The Heat Wave [en]

[fr] L'oeil qui voyait trouble? Pas un coup de soleil, mais un mini corps étranger métallique. Oui, ouille. J'en ai monstre marre de voir flou de mon oeil dominant, juste là.

It was much cooler up in the mountains. Here I am in Lausanne, with another heat wave hitting us. Or the same. I don’t know anymore, this summer has been endless days in survivor mode trying to keep my flat cool. The largest part of my flat faces southwest. As soon as it gets warmer outside than inside, I close everything. I close the blinds so the sun doesn’t heat my rooms through the windows. And late in the evening, when the temperature has dropped a few degrees, and the outside air is finally cooler than inside, I open everything wide.

heat wave 2015

No ceiling fans or AC here. Swiss buildings are designed to keep the cold out.

Remember the fuzzy vision I told you about a few days ago? Wednesday morning I headed over to Lausanne’s eye hospital. I spent most of the morning there. The fun bit is that I got to see two young doctors doing their internship. They were very friendly and relaxed, went through all the preliminary questions, examined my eye, tinkered with the devices in the room (they usually saw patients in another room, they explained, and weren’t familiar with this one), and then went to present my case to the doctor supervising them, who then saw me to close the case.

Turns out it wasn’t too much sun. Oh no. It was a speck of metal dust stuck in my eye, right in the middle. Tiny, a fifth of a millimetre or something. My first reaction was “OMG metal in my eye”, followed straight behind by “OMGOMG you’re going to have to remove it!” The doctor reassured me that this was something they did many times a day and was no big deal.

A few drops of anaesthetic in my eye, some deep breaths (well, I tried, at least) and clenched hands on the handles in front of me, staring straight ahead with my other eye, straight ahead, very important not to move, straight ahead… and that was it. He scraped out the nasty little thing from my eye. Oh, and a tiny layer of my cornea, too, he explained. (Luckily I’ve had enough feline eye adventures with Sir Quintus that this didn’t alarm me. But still.)

So, now I’m left with gooey antibiotic drops (we don’t want an infection there) and still-blurry vision. It’s really making reading (on-screen or off-screen) difficult and frustrating. The blurry eye is my dominant eye, otherwise it wouldn’t be so bad. It still hurts a bit at night, but hopefully the pain should go away in a few short days. I don’t know about the timeline for the blurry vision, and it’s starting to distress me. The nurse on the hotline suggested I give it the week-end and come around on Monday if it was still bad. At this stage what’s going through my mind is “I hope I get all my vision back at some point” and “I hope it doesn’t take too long, because it’s starting to impact my ability to work”.

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Rafraîchissez les idées à votre Macbook [fr]

[en] Is your Macbook warming your lap a bit too much? whirring its fans noisily when you want to enjoy the calm? Help it cool down with Coolbook.

It will make your Macbook even cooler.

Votre Macbook vous chauffe les genoux de manière excessive? Il ventile bruyamment alors que vous désirez jouir du calme de votre salon? Rafraîchissez-lui les idées avec [Coolbook](http://www.coolbook.se/CoolBook.html).

De quoi vraiment rendre votre Macbook encore plus cool.

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