Every year at about this time, your ‘Thumbs up, thumbs down’ feature has a thumbs down to people still using their air conditioners. Every year this makes me just a little bit cross.

There are any number of reasons why people might not want to just “open a window: “noisy neighbours, traffic, children who are too small to be safely left unattended in an upstairs room with an open window or are too small to close the window by themselves when they get too cold.

In the summer, we open the windows in the early evening to cool the house down, but if it’s still hot at bed time the windows get closed and the AC goes on.

However, we are more likely to run the air conditioner at this time of year than we are in the middle of the summer. Why? One word: ragweed!

How about a bit of sympathy for the afflicted, rather than nagging. Thumbs down to ragweed ruining the end of summer for allergy sufferers everywhere.

Sarah Robinson
Guelph