Fish Bones (or, Things Are More Complicated Than You MIght Think)

During each of the years 2010, 2011, and 2012 I endured at least four weeks with very little sleep.  The heat was impossible here in the Caribbean, and what you can work with during the day is not the same as what you can sleep with at night.  I would pass the nights going from my bed – where the mattress and pillows seemed to be radiating heat – to the cooler floor, where my 40+-year-old bones couldn't take the pain.  I racked my brain, thinking of what I could do.  The fan (when the electricity worked, which thankfully was more often than not) cooled the parts of my body that were exposed.  But I couldn't sleep in my birthday suit since my bed is right next to a large window that other residents walk by.  I enlisted the help of friends, but we couldn't figure out a way to cover the windows adequately while still allowing air in.

I kept fantasizing about ice, but the refrigerator at my pension's lodgings was frequently on the fritz, and ice was, well, a hot commodity (heh-heh).  However, at the end of last year we bought a dorm-style refrigerator for our office.  It has a teeny freezer, and this summer my co-workers started freezing drinking water in bags to take home to their families.  I bought a small cooler and started taking a small block of ice to my room every night.

Passing the block of ice over me turned out to be a little wet – which is not as cooling in a humid climate as it would be in Arizona.  So I splurged on Amazon.com and ordered ice packs.  However, they wouldn't actually freeze in our dinky little freezer in just one day.  So since my pension had recently bought a new refrigerator I put them in its freezer. 

Ouch!  I wrapped the ice packs in a plastic bag (the freezer isn't so clean) and the first day I went to get them I grabbed the wrong bag – it had fish bones in it!  Bleeding only slightly, I found and retrieved the right bag.  But the cold packs were only barely cold, and definitely not frozen.  “Oh, yes,” said an employee of the pension, “The freezer doesn't really work anymore.”

So I'm back to a block of ice in a bag in my cooler.  But it actually works like a charm!  I put my burning feet on the block of ice every time I get too hot during the night.  Problem solved, with only a few hiccups (and three years) along the way.