So last week was… well, not Hell. But it was Oklahoma in the summertime without air conditioning, which can be easy to confuse for that other place. At any rate, it was one of the most difficult weeks in recent memory, speaking on a purely physical basis, and not much got done that wasn’t taking cold showers and giving the dog cold baths and sipping cold drinks and watching DIY air condenser repair videos on YouTube and generally hating life.
We first noticed that the condenser fan had stopped running toward the end of the previous week. At that point the temps weren’t so bad, so we didn’t panic. We were able to jerry-rig a screen on our patio door (which doesn’t have one built in), open some windows and turn on all the ceiling fans, and between the low-90s temps and the steady breezes, we were comfortable enough that Matt thought maybe he could take the time to learn how to fix it himself. I give him an A for effort and an A+ for tenacity, and I do believe he learned a lot. But by the time Thursday rolled around and it still didn’t work, the breezes all died away and the heat index ratcheted up to 111, he was ready to throw in the towel and call in my brother, who repairs ACs for a living.
Now I’m sure you’re asking, “Jean, if you have a brother who is an AC repairman, why on earth did you suffer with a broken AC for an entire week before calling him?” And there is an answer for that, albeit a lame one, and it is that we were afraid it would be awkward. See, in all the time we’ve lived here we’ve never had him over, and we both hated the thought that the first time we ever invited him over was to fix our air conditioner. Now, in our defense, we don’t know where he lives or what his place looks like, either. I guess we’re not really all that close. We usually see each other at Mom’s house on holidays and other occasions, and we text each other on occasion, and that’s usually enough.
Still, it felt awkward enough that we put it off for as long as we could. Of course, in true big brother fashion, he was happy to take time out of his Saturday to come take care of it. He replaced the capacitor and did some rewiring and got it running again, much to our relief. We paid him in pie and a promise to have him and my SIL over soon to feed them dinner and not ask him to do any manual labor. And thus endeth our week of pain.
But like I said, for the most part, it wasn’t that terrible. We spent a lot of time out on the patio, and on the worst day I took my laptop to the library to get some work done. Poor Matt, though, had to stay home to make sure the pets didn’t overheat. That was our biggest challenge, especially keeping Pete cooled off, because he was really having a hard time with it. Basically, we kept him wet pretty constantly and fed him a lot of ice. Toward the end, I rigged up a bandanna with a pocket to hold an ice cube that he could wear around his neck, which seemed to help.
But that was a week of lost productivity immediately following another week of productivity loss due to me simply feeling like crud all week. So I’ve got a lot of catching up to do. I made up a lot of ground yesterday by doing all of the laundry, plus some mending, and vacuuming and other house work. Now I need to get some articles written and finished up while there’s still enough daylight left to do some yard work. After a weekend off, though, I’m having trouble getting the writing gears fired up again, so hopefully writing this post will give them a bit of grease and get me going.
Speaking of writing, it’s been two weeks since I’ve even attempted fiction or thought about the direction I want to go there. Once I’m caught up, I need to sit down and do some serious thinking in that regard. At any rate, I think it’s pretty much a given at this point that I won’t be doing the July session of Camp Nano. But good luck and happy writing to any campers who are.