Keeping Cool

As the weather has jumped from the seventies straight to the nineties, I have been trying to think of ways to keep the house cool without cranking up the AC. My first thought was, "What dinners can I make that don't require the use of the oven, or even much stove top time?" This was actually a little difficult for me to think of. It is interesting how there are different cooking mindsets based upon the Seasons. In the summer it seems that my brain completely shuts down where meal planning is concerned. I need to come up with a large list of "summertime meals." Tonight we are going to have salad with chicken (The problem here is that I always like some warm bread to go with my salad, so I'm going to make bread in the bread machine, and put the bread machine outside so that it doesn't warm up the kitchen.) Tomorrow we will bbq shish kabobs and Friday I am planning on making fish, homemade pizza on Saturday (requires the oven, but only for 20 min.) and on Sunday we will be having egg salad sandwiches. As I have just about exhausted my summertime meal ideas in one week, I need to do some research to come up with more. The next thing that I thought of that really heats
up the house is laundry, particularly the dryer. Therefore, we need a clothesline. We are planning on eventually putting up a nice
retractable, five-line clothesline in our yard, but this will require Patrick cementing in a pole or something for it to attach to, which he won't have time to do until the garden is done. So today I decided to improvise. I have always had a clothing rack, (seen standing on the ground behind the trees) but it just doesn't hold enough. I decided to tie rope between some of our trees and try hanging clothes on that, and it seems to be working thus far. Of course, the question now is, will the clothes actually dry in the humidity outside or will this have been useless?