Many people have asked, "Hey Merle Wayne Sneed, how do you keep cool in those 150 degree summers down there in Hooterville? The answer is that it is a dry heat. Our average daytime humidity during the hottest part of the summer is about 8 to 10 percent. Those 150 degree days feel like 140, 145 tops. Okay, so that's an exaggeration. It rarely gets over 110 in Hooterville, 113, 114 max. With low humidity, it feels like 110 tops. Dry heat is overrated. The traditional way to cool one's home here in the desert, is the evaporative cooler, affectionately or not so affectionately called a swamp box by the locals. This device is well-suited to our low humitity. "But, how does an evaporative cooler work, Merle Wayne", you might ask? An evaporative cooler pumps water over pads, usually aspen shavings, and at the same time draws hot air in, to be cooled by the evaporating water. The cooled air is blown into the house. A home whose inside temperature would be an intolerable 95 degrees if left uncooled in the summer, can be chilled to a barely tolerable 80 degrees using an evaporative cooler. Not comfort, but whatever is between heaven and hell. The downside to evaporative coolers, besides their marginal efficiency, is that they are high in upkeep and messy as hell. Evaporating water leaves a salty toxic soup. Until about twenty years ago homes in Hooterville were poorly insulated and air-conditioning was impractical for the average citizen. Hootervillians cringed at $400 per month cooling bills. We were divided into the cooler people and the air-conditioning people, terms that could be used interchangeably with rich and poor. But times have changed and improvements in insulation and in air conditioning technology have rendered the evaporative cooler obsolete for new homes. No new home has been built with evaporative cooling in a decade. Our hardware store is in an old part of town. We have no new homes to speak of, so we do a land office business, come cooler season. That begins now, peaks in May and drags on until October. We sell pads, pumps, motors, cleaning supplies, you name it. If it is for evaporative coolers, we sell it. I got my first big customer of the season today. A guy came in to buy supplies for the evaporative coolers for his apartment complex. He bought $1500 worth of stuff. That is a big sale for our store, the biggest I've ever seen. Another guy spent a couple of hundred for his carpet business. But what is Merle Wayne Sneed's interest in the sales of the store and in its financial well-being? You might be tempted to think that good sales mean continued employment. You would be wrong. Losing my job is way down the list of things I care about. We get bonuses on good sales and cooler season means good sales. It can be expressed as a mathematical equation, a=b, where a equals good sales and b equals my bonus. Things in this blog represented to be fact, may or may not actually be true. The writer is frequently wrong, sometimes just full of it, but always judgmental and cranky