I had a grandfather that was just the most larger than life character.
He made such an impression on me that as a man in his mid 50’s, I still think of him and his stories.
He’s been gone well over 30 years and yet I still miss him. Thankfully, my dad made a video tape or two when my gramps was really going on about his exploits. Gramps didn’t know it at the time which makes it all the better. One of those tales was about how we are all so soft with our HVAC cooling in the summer. And this from a man who would crank his thermostat down to 70 degrees even when it was a hundred outside. But, having grown up and lived without modern HVAC much of his life, I guess he was just getting even. I’ve talked to my dad many times about those pre-HVAC days. My dad is in his 80’s now but can sort of remember the first time they had a central air system in the house. He would talk about going to see his grandparents and dealing with the heat. Like me, these were people who grew up and lived in a region where the summer temps hover around triple digits with similar humidity levels. Dad remembers his gramps thought it was too fancy just to have an evaporative cooler. That’s just crazy to me. I can’t even fathom living through one of our summers without the HVAC cooling we get from the heat pump. We all get a bit put out during the peak heating hours because we let the house heat up in order to save on HVAC. I can’t imagine the moaning and complaining if we only had a swamp cooler.