A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction You can use this book to design a house for yourself with your family; you can use it to work with your neighbors to improve your town and neighborhood; you can use it to design an office, or a workshop, or a public building. And you can use it to guide you in the actual process of construction.
Since I am afraid of heights, that baby cage is scary. With all the pollution in that area and the lack of greenery, I wonder how "fresh" the air can be. Because I thought fresh air was good for my son, I put him on the carport in a wooden play pen. He ate, slept and moved around, perfectly content. He was not fond of the inside. Since sleeping in night air makes me really ill, I am thankful for ac.
I did not mean to post. Here in the South, traditionally, people slept on balconies and porches to escape the heat. I am not so sure it was for health benefits. But, I remember hearing older folk saying they could not sleep indoors. Our summer heat with humidity is stifling.
When I was a kid in the 50s in the Hudson Valley of New York my father used to pitch a tent in the backyard for my sister and me. He built a wooden platform to hold a mattress off the ground and that's where we slept all summer.
It became a neighborhood sensation and all our friends wanted to sleep with us in the tent. A couple families got sleeping tents for their kids too.
It really is a fond memory and I considered doing it for my kids but LA seemed a little too risky for it so I, sadly, declined. But my daughter and her husband still have the occasional family tent night in the backyard. If the sprinklers come on in the morning it's all that much more exciting.
That sounds wonderful. Now, in many places sleeping with the windows open can be risky with so many people climbing in to steal children. I live in a very safe place, but now I would not allow my children to sleep in the backyard. I was going to allow it in the 70s, but the kids were on my heels when I opened the patio door!
This week the northern Sacramento Valley is reaching highs of somewhere around 109 or 110 and the lack of our usual evening breeze keeps the nighttime lows approaching 80 (in other words, we're spoiled with our typical summer lows in the 60s and so this heat wave is downright unpleasant). Without the natural cooling we're used to (open windows all night and a refreshed house in the morning), I've pulled out my Chinese reed mats.
I can't figure out what they are in English (they're actually made of rushes) – not quite the mats people take to the beach and not quite tatami, they're stiffly woven and smooth. They allow for air circulation UNDER you while you sleep and so help keep you cool when otherwise you'd be a sweaty, melted mess.
They're wonderful. With them, I don't have to run AC at night. Even sleeping outside in the tent didn't give the degree of relief just using my 席子 (shee-zi) did.
We need this kind of low-tech answer to counteract what we've come to think is normal but that is really a huge sucking mess. Simple, really.
I think that it is funny for the outdoor bed to come from San Francisco, where it rarely gets warm enough to warrant such a thing.
Unfortunately now that Southern California has West Nile and Zika Virus carrying mosquitoes, I'm not sure if sleeping outdoors at night during the summer is really advisable.
Oh man, so cool! I really want to see pictures of this!
Tried to paste some pictures into the comments here but the computer didn't seem to want to have any- maybe I can email you some and you can add them in?
My 1896 house has a "California refrigerator" – a cupboard with slats that open to the back to the outside, on the side of the house, presumably built in the 20s or 30s when the kitchen was added. But no California outdoor bed! I wish! We still function largely without the "technology" of AC, depending on fans to cool us off. I've thought about taking a pillow onto the roof more than once.
Inder, a friend of mine also has one of these (we did too but it was too far gone to save). I've been meaning to do a post on the California fridge. My friend uses it and it works.