1 You should put height and width attributes on the img tag for the top picture. Otherwise, the page might not render until the connection to the offline server times out.

2 The size of the top div is already hard-wired.

3 I'm in the same area as you (in my case, Vancouver...) and my wife thought I was crazy to get an AC unit a few years back.  She has appreciated it more and more as she gets older, though...

I grew up in AZ, so I know the value of a good AC unit.  She's grown up around here, and wasn't exposed to home AC that much until she met me.  Now, she doesn't want to live without it.

You might want to think about getting one this fall (when they start clearancing them out).

4

Then again, I might not want to.

Here in Portland it doesn't get beastly hot all that often. Last summer there were only two days when I boiled. Probably there will be more this year, but I doubt it will be more than five or six. It isn't worth buying air conditioning for that -- especially since I live in an apartment.

Waking up this morning, in that marvelous lucid moment between dream and reality, a vision came to me. I saw a bag of ice in my kitchen sink, with a fan blowing air over it. So I just went out and bought a fan and a couple of bags of ice. In an hour or two, when it gets worse, I'm going to give it a try. $35 for the fan, and $2.50 for the ice -- and if it works, buying more ice is cheap.

It has to work at least somewhat; the question is whether it will work well enough to be worthwhile. I think it will, but I'll let you know.

5

Engineers say that, "A stupid idea that works isn't stupid." This one is working a lot better than I expected it to. After just 15 minutes the temperature in here is noticeably lower than before I turned on the fan.

Unfortunately, I don't have a room thermometer so I can't provide a quantitative measurement, but it certain feels a lot better, and not because the air is moving. (It isn't, where I'm sitting, a long way away from the fan and 90 degrees off its direction.)

6

It's the height of the heat of the day out right now, and my ersatz air conditioning is working so well that I've stopped sweating.

Maybe a third of the ice has melted by now. The rest of it will certainly last long enough to get me through the rest of the day.

7 Ah, apartment - that makes a difference...

Glad to hear the ice trick worked - when I was in an apartment, I personally would sit with a sprayer (like on the cleaning bottles), and about every 10 minutes or so would spray water in front of the fan.  Your way is much more efficient.