Cooling off
It’s been hot–in the 90s–the last couple of days a mile away from the Oregon Coast. This is when I’m glad I installed a “Whole House Ceiling Fan” in the far bedroom at the other end of the house a few years ago. When the evening cools down, as it always does here, I turn on the Whole House Fan, which is an exhaust fan which sucks a large volume of air out of the house and empties it into the attic where vents transfer it outside.
It’s big enough (30 inches square) to create a nice draft through the house, sucking cool evening air in through open windows at the opposite end of the house, thus cooling the whole house with the evening air. Wonderfully simple device. My house never gets really hot, as I am well insulated and have an additional fan — an automatic attic vent fan — just below the main roof gable. When the air in the attic gets hot enough, the fan kicks on and sucks it through a vent in the roof. Get rid of the hot air that collects in your attic, and it makes cooling your house much easier. But some heat still builds up in the interior. This is just a stick house built on a foundation, with no thermal mass in it 
or design features that allow me to tap into the constant temperature of the ground. (For some BHM articles that discuss “thermal mass”, just type in “thermal mass” in the search window on our Home page.) But the Whole House Fan works pretty well. My three sons have other innovative ways to cool off. Jake, your typical teenager who will try just about anything, will take a dip in the 
horse trough if he’s hot enough. He doesn’t mind that there are mosquito fish in it. Sammy and Robby will wade in the little fish pond we’ve been creating for the last couple of years. There are lots of big — 6 to 8 inch — goldfish and salamanders in the pond, but the boys don’t care. A publishing tip We’re just shy of three weeks from deadline for the Christmas (Nov/Dec 2007) issue, so we’ve been working behind the scenes with various writers and examining submissions. If you submit something to us, whether via snail mail or email, you have to be patient. It can take a while for us to decide. Sometimes it’s just a quick read and a “yes” or “no,” but sometimes we have to think on it. We tend not to keep in touch with writers during this 
process; there’s just too much other stuff to do to keep people informed of every move we make. So if you are a writer, please be patient and we’ll get back to you eventually. Organization is one of the key talents a publisher must have. If you can’t keep track of vast amounts of information, you’ll have trouble being a publisher. As the years have gone by, I’ve been lucky enough to hire people who can organize and keep track, so I tend to delegate many of these tasks to my employees. I’ve already told you about Lisa in a previous post, who helps me organize the editorial side of the business. My wife, Lenie, takes care of the details of the business side of the business. It’s scary what she has to keep track of. One person cannot handle the organization of both the editorial and business sides of a publication like this; there is simply too much pulse to feel.
