Lately My Chemical Romance has been traveling a lot for work. And inevitably as soon as he walks out the door, something in the house starts leaking, falling down, breaking or bleeding. I’m not a huge fan of solo parenting; the only reason we have so many kids is that we made a deal early in our marriage: as long as he let me sleep in every weekend helped me as much as possible, we could have a large family. Usually My Chemical Romance is very helpful. But that’s when he’s here.
Last week, it was the air conditioner.
You may have heard me mention that our a/c kind of sucks? It’s weak, especially after living in Arizona for three years, in a ranch style house that I kept like a sub-zero freezer. That place got frigid. Here, I usually can’t get the temperature below 78* or 77*, and I sleep with the overhead fan on and an oscillating fan pointed directly at me. Meanwhile, the day My Chemical Romance left, I noticed the downstairs was 82*. I tried my usual tricks of turning off every light, unplugging everything and turning on all the overhead fans. 81*. Finally I posted on Facebook.
Everyone on FB was really helpful, including my uncle who gave a lengthy explanation about the difference between leaving the fan on “auto” versus leaving the fan on “on,” and most people suggested I turn my house into a cave with all the shades drawn, and reminded me that a/c isn’t really made to get the temperature more than 20* lower than the outside temp, which was right around 100*, so really, NOTHING WAS WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE. Ha. Am I the only person who sweats when she gets up off the couch to get something to eat?
Eventually, I went outside to check on the units (one sucky upstairs unit, one sucky downstairs unit), and noticed that one wasn’t spinning at all. At which point I realized that for as helpful as My Chemical Romance is, he’s really totally not helpful when he’s NOT HOME and isn’t planning to return home before 7pm. So I called a HVAC company and explained the situation, mostly like, “Hi, my a/c isn’t working. Please help me.”
The HVAC company threw around a lot of big words like broken and frozen and 20 to 40 minute response time before we’re in your area until the really nice receptionist asked me about the breaker. The what-huh-now? The breaker? The thing in the garage above the deep freezer full of breastmilk, that My Chemical Romance sometimes flips on and off after the vacuum cleaner stops working? That thing? Yes, we have one in the garage above the deep freezer full of breastmilk, the My Chemical Romance sometimes flips on and off after the vacuum cleaner stops working. Can I go flip it on and off? Well, okay. Sure.
And it was like god herself said, let their be air. And let it be cold, and be fruitful and multiply, and bring down the temperature of the downstairs…
So I went back to Facebook, where my many “friends” had assumed that just because I have a Bachelor’s Degree from the University of Michigan, that means I will check if something is plugged in before I turn it on. I will not, clearly.
Filed under: Daily Life, family | Tagged: air conditioning, daily life, family, home | 2 Comments »
