Wednesday, September 13, 2006

cold again

this is totally not blog worthy.

it's gotten cold all of a sudden. if anything, the weather in Tokyo is fickle. 5am sat night I was happy in a tank top and now I'm freezing in the rain.

my air conditioner hasn't caught on though. it's still blowing cold air. I pick up the remote. hit some buttons. it beeps. it's still cold.

and then I realize, for me, in my little version of culture shock, not being able to work the air conditioner/heater with out spending half and hour with the Kanji dictionary is one of the top ten frusterations of living in Japan. strange food? no problem. oh, I'm eating raw horse... whatever. everyone calling me blond, forgivable. wearing makeup to work, something I can get used to.

cold air when I want hot... infuriating.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Dear fustrated and tempaturelly challenged. As Your climate control engineeer, I must advise you. The air conditioning unit will not put out heat in it's present location. But wait, kindly note that the unit exauhsts to the outside. If then, the unit is brought entirely inside , so that it is circulating the inside air, the mechinism will heat the room. Consider thermodynamically, if you will ... (grandpa's line), that the unit adds energy to extract heat from existing warm air, thus blowing 1 unit of cold into the room and two units of heat outside. Hence if pulled entirely inside, the window closed, and set on deep chill, it will be 80 in your room in 20 min.
Other than that, if there is latent heat in the building, you might just try unplugging the bugger and wear a sweater, though i do not reccomend this, as they are clumbsy and floppy and itchy.
lastly, an oft overlooked method of staying warm, would be this. Place your microwave oven about waist high such that the door points to the majority of the room. Open the door and look around the edges. there will be a switch there some place, possibly inside the catch for the door. jam the switch open and leave the door open. Run the microwave at deep fat fry, bathing the room in one foot waves of the electromagnetic spectrum. Hey, it's all natural, right? The radiation will agitate the water molecules on the surface of yor skin, giving you the sensation of warmpth.The less clothes you have on, the better this will work, even if the room hovers at 38 faringient. Note that some microwaves have additional safeguards on the doors following various accidents of urban legend. In this case, the screen thingy in the door, and even the glass is reccomended to be removed, such that the full effect can be enjoyed.
hoping you get warm wonderful blogger. Please don't get those nasty colds of last year. Down with green. Your loving admirer,
Dr. Thermo