Tonight, Brad was sitting here reading at the kitchen bar, and for some reason it gave me a flashback to our first apartment back in Provo, UT.  We lived in a little one-bedroom basement apartment with a kitchen too small for a table, but there was a small bar that we pulled a couple of stools up to when we ate.

Responding to this flashback, I pulled out my photo albums, hoping to find a picture of that little kitchen bar from 1994.  Sadly, I have no photos of the inside of that apartment at all.

But, I did find this picture of the outside:

This is Brad with the "swamp cooler" he made in an effort to cool off our hot, air-conditionerless apartment.  

He built a frame with wood, then tacked old towels to it and put an old bathroom fan inside.  The idea was that we'd wet the towels with the garden hose, and as they dried, the condensation would cool the air inside the contraption.  The bathroom fan inside would then blow the cooled air into our window.

It absolutely did not work.  At all.  

But, nobody could tell that to Brad.  He was so proud of his "swamp cooler", so we spent many an evening sweltering in our living room, trying to hear the TV over the racket of that old bathroom fan banging away as the hose sprayed water everywhere.  And every so often, he'd say something about how much nicer it was now that he'd rigged that cooler up.

Is it any wonder that I love this man?