Don't 'Sweat' the Small Stuff

Eric asked another good question, one I really hadn't addressed in detail before.

His question, "...how long did it take you to acclimate to where the humidity was no longer a big issue, you could sleep well at night, and 60 became cold?"

Our Major A/C Unit

To be honest, until we built a pool. That became our A/C and still is. We did break down last year and bought a split A/C unit for the bedroom, but we only use it at night if the temp is above 80. We have the A/C set on 80. Otherwise, it’s just too expensive to use.

The one thing that seems to be the hardest to get used to, is sweating. I think Gringos, in general, have a cultural bias against sweating. Oh, sure. We sweat at the gym, or maybe when you run, or something like that. But that’s ‘cute’ sweat. Real sweat is when you can wring out your shirt like you had been standing under a faucet, and do it all day long, even when you’re sitting reading.

Our Sweat Rag Collection

Like right now, behind my ears is wet with sweat. You learn to never get far from your sweat rag. Dianna and I have a set of about 40 or so hand towel sort of things that we use as sweat rags. A new one at least every day. They too will become saturated and won’t suck up any more moisture, then it's time for a new one.

Of course, along with sweating, goes drinking water. Dianna had a hard time getting used to the fact that she had to drink three to four litres of water a day, doing nothing. We keep our reverse osmosis system busy. We have a dozen or so litre bottles in the fridge filled with RO water.

Part of Our Bottle Collection

We quit worrying about BPA (Bisphenol A) in the bottles when we found out a couple of months ago, that most bottle manufacturers have stopped using BPA plastics since 2004. and, even if they haven't, we're old enough to not really care all that much.

Really, the biggest thing to worry about with the bottles now is bacteria. Each time we empty a bottle we put it in the sink, squirt a bit of bleach into it and fill it to the brim with tap water, inserting the pop-up lid upside-down into the bottle so, the mouthpiece (or whatever it is) is immersed in the bleach water. Then, when we wash dishes, we rinse out the bottles, and refill them from the RO tap, and put them back in the fridge.

Kitchen RO Faucet

One of our fridges has an automatic ice maker and a water/ice tap in the door. We plumbed that into the RO system as well. That was quite easy to do, involving using ¼" poly tubing and a couple of fittings.

There's your inital primer on sweat and water down in the tropics. Happy sweating, everyone.