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My wife (like yourself, delightfully curvaceous) is from often-chilly Oregon, and I'm from fog-shrouded Berkeley; we live in Silicon Valley and consider air conditioning to be an essential in summer. (We also have Maine Coon cats, who agree.) Now that we own our own home, we have central air conditioning; in previous apartments, where we weren't allowed to install them, I had a variety of solutions including mounting one in the fireplace. (Chimneys are designed to pull hot gases upward, right? That and water are what comes out the back of an A/C...) If you don't have a fireplace to abuse, and your landlord won't let you install anything in the window, we also found it effective to put a milk crate onto the dresser below the window, put a cement mixing bucket on that, put a broad Tupperware inside that as a pillar for a small (microwave oven-sized) air conditioner, and shove the back of the air conditioner up against the window screen and drop a breeze-blocking shade down to the top of the air conditioner so the hot air didn't get in. This cooled down a small bedroom very nicely, and running it overnight pretty much filled the cement mixing bucket with water that I had to dump in the morning.
Our current "green" solution is a Margaritaville ice shaver/blender device. While it's designed for cranking out frozen drinks, I find that a few ounces of Splenda-sweetened Torani syrups are good for making a palatable frozen beverage, and melting all that ice with your body heat cools you down nicely. (It's much more effective than ice water because you're melting ice, not just warming cold water; this uses up about three times the calories.) Knock back one or two of those and turning on the air conditioner may not seem quite so urgent.
(For the cats, we got a couple of Chill-a-Bowls, which are double-walled plastic bowls with ice between the walls, and swap them between freezer and kibble tray.)
