Happy Fourth of July, y'all! Keep cool in this heat.

How am I celebrating? I don't know. It's not Sunday the 4th yet as I type this, but only Friday the 2nd. I probably bought some hot dogs to grill (not burgers, because I buy burgers every time I come here to post), maybe the smallest jar of mayonnaise I can buy to use before it goes bad so I can make potato salad, maybe I bought a watermelon since mine aren't even fruiting yet.

Grilling outside isn't really unusual for me these days. I've taken to even heating up the water for my morning coffee on my outside grill, because even at 7:00 in the goddamn AM, it is too hot to be heating up the house any further with cooking fires. Once the realization set in that it was generally going to be this way until at least September, I decided to take further action.

Two days ago, I assembled another lean-to.

This would be the fourth such structure I've built on this property. (And now that I've begun writing up the article, it's finally dawned on me that I haven't taken any pictures of this structure yet, but I'll just go ahead and Leroy Jenkins this article anyway.)

The first structure was a pale imitation of the second, and lasted for about a month before it was elaborated and enlarged into becoming the second. It was also moved; I recall placing the first on an area that I roughly estimated to be my property line before the road I was building made its turn onto my street.

More accurate surveying later determined it was a foot inside the neighbor's property, which is why I moved it. I've never met the neighbor, don't even know if anyone owns that property, but I wanted to be able to relax on a place that I knew was mine.

The second structure looked like pic related. I built it for the reverse problem from what I have now: I needed a way to keep heat in. This was before my house was built, indeed before it was even a hole in the ground, and the weather was cold enough at the time that I wanted a way I could burn sagebrush and trap a significant part of the heat in a structure of some kind. So a burn barrel that is still my outdoor grill was placed far enough away from the hole I'd dug for my chair that I wouldn't sweat when it was burning, and the area between the two was lined with dead sagebrush to keep the wind from blowing the heat away, and in general as a fuel reserve.

It worked pretty well, but I resolved the problem it was designed to solve, a lack of heat, in two ways. I finished my house, which traps the heat from burning sagebrush far more effectively than some ersatz shelter ever could. I also now go visit my parents every winter, so I shouldn't even be onsite to deal with the coldest weather at all, although now I certainly could in a sheer survival sense.

The third lean-to I built was the one that inspired my current effort, the one that kept me cool last summer as I built my house. It was designed to keep the sun's rays off me, but the wind's blast all over me. Outside of the sunshine, any wind below 98 degrees is a cooling wind, and I used that to maximum effect. I dismantled it because it was built out of some of the OSB with which I'd build my house.

But now it's summer again, and my house isn't enough. Don't get me wrong; it certainly helps. Half of it is currently underground, and all of it is currently in the shade. I can count on my house to keep me cool in the mornings without need of fans until at least 11:00 AM. If I could finish mounding the earth around my house, I could probably rely on it to keep me cool all day long, even in 100 degree heat. But I would have to work outside for that: gathering stones from the road, and assembling them so they'd hold up the mounded earth. And currently all my outside labor (which, like last year, mostly takes place at sunset) is dedicated to building my greenhouse so I can move all the junk out of my house and put a floor in it. (Although, with the heat the way it's been, I may have to re-prioritize my endeavors.)

In any case, until my house's earth shell is complete, it only keeps me lukecool (it's a word now, shut up). And even when that's fixed, I'm still going to need a place to sit and watch food cook when it's too hot to do that inside. So I designed a fourth lean-to structure, it looks much like the third but it's completely separate from the house. I think I may have stuck it too close to the greenhouse, specifically to the place I'm going to put the door. But like the last one, it's easily disassembled and moved, so I'm sure I'll rectify this eventually. Possibly several times; I intend to completely remake the entire property and expect that this lean-to will be in the way several more times. But I don't expect to stop needing it, so this or something like it (really wish I had a pic to share with y'all, maybe next time) is going to be here for the rest of my life, I expect.