Lawrence of Arabia
would want to go indoors and have a cool, tall drink, at this point. Yesterday i spent most of the day inside, apart from some parallel parking practice with the Oglet. I was gonna weed in the garden, but decided if the weeds could stand the heat they were tougher than me, at this point.
I will have to mow pretty damned soon, though. Not relishing the thought. I wish I could get my hands on an LCVG.
When I worked at Inland Steel, You had to wear longhandled underwear, winter or summer. you wore them under your flamesuit, and the flamesuit would sometimes get hot enough that it would scald your skin if you didn’t have longjohns on underneath.
Hamilton Standard, at the time, was making LCVG’s for the space program, and they would sometimes test designs in foundries. Some are still used in steel mills and in firefighting. So once, for a week, I test drove the long underwear used in spacesuits. Several guys got to test them, we took turns, and I was one of the first. Thank God, because they a: Didn’t want you to wear anyting underneath them- they wanted all the tubing that was woven through the suit to be in contact with bare skin, and b: wouldn’t wash them between uses because there was a lot of work involved in yanking out all the tubing and re-installing it afterwards.
You wore a sort of a backpack thing with a little NiCad powered pump on it, and the pump circulated water through the tubes at a predetermined temperature, paying most attention to your extremeties if it was hot, your kidneys if it was cold. You had to change the battery pack every half hour or so because it had a very primitive and inefficient peltier cooler.
It worked. It wasn’t the best thing on earth, but it worked, and I was sorry to see it go.
Later I found out how much the bastards cost- near a hundred grand, from what they said at the time- and decided I wasn’t gonna get hung up on it. I could still buy 100% cotton longjohns from JCPenneys for $9 at the time- tops and bottoms. So they got sweaty and had some crotchrot, at least I didn’t have to rent Mom out to the Hungarian Militia.
