A hat for her apartment

After a few weeks in Bangkok I met a nice lady. I told her I'd like to cook a meal and she invited me to her apartment. I stopped at Villa supermarket and bought too much capelloni and fifteem tasty looking Australian scallops for 150 baht and some buttterhead lettuce and a bottle of Shiraz, a little expensive but not too bad at 550 baht. Excellent bread, too.

I arrived at the lady's apartment at about seven o'clock and it was like an oven. The place was on the top floor and there was a 4 inch concrete slab between her and the sun, the slab was still glowering away in the night, about 40 degrees sti;; even after sundown. "This will never do," I said.

The next week I made a model of the daily heat budget of the roof and room, you can see a two day run in the illustration. The top of the roof gets up to about 60 degrees but the underside gets pretty warm too, a little later in the afternoon.

I figured a nice black net would prevent that big heat buildup during the day.

My lady friend had a contractor who owed her a favor and I showed him how to build a tent on top of the roof, using that net-like stuff that they put over plant nurseries and fish markets. I got the idea from watching fisherfolk on the Mekong River near Vientiane.

I took temperature measurements later, of course. The bedroom was much more comfortable with the net.

Here I am standing on the roof next to the net.

Funny thing is, turned the contractor owed here a favor but not that big a favor, so I loaned here the money to make up the diffrence, a couple of thousand baht. Funny thing is, she hasn't given me the money yet, but I'm very proud of the accomplishment.