Ahhhhh.



That's what it feels like in my house right now, finally. I don't think there is a single greater invention in this world than air conditioning. Well, there probably is, but I sure couldn't think of one yesterday as I waited for the repairman to show up.

Our house is a rental, which means we cannot handle any repair work ourselves. Well, we can, but it's really better to consult the person who actually owns the house. So I called my landlord yesterday morning after a wonderful night in the motel Sunday. It was 89 degrees in the house yesterday morning when I placed the call. But guess what? There was no helpful landlord to fix the problem. He's on vacation this week, probably to somewhere a heck of a lot cooler than my house. After pondering briefly how to handle this unfortunate news, I left a message with his secretary that we would be calling someone to handle the problem, and deducting the cost from our next month's rent. Yippee.

So I called a repair person. The lady at the a/c company said she'd call me when the serviceman was on his way. That was at about 9:30 yesterday morning. At 3 p.m. I got a call that the repair guy was coming. By this time, the temperature in the house was 100 degrees. I had three ceiling fans, two box fans, and one little round floor fan blowing their little hearts out trying to keep air moving inside the house. It wouldn't have done any good to go outside, because the weather was just as unpleasant out there. I couldn't leave the house and drive around in the air conditioned car, because I had to wait for the repairman. It was miserable. The dog and I laid nose to nose on the hardwood floor, contemplating how miserable it was. I think the dog was more miserable than I was, owing to his thick double coat of black fur. There can be nothing worse than being a black dog in the summertime (I believe Harper Lee even pointed that out in To Kill A Mockingbird).

When the repairman showed up, he poked and prodded at the a/c unit outside for a few minutes, hooked up a gauge of some kind to it, and then asked to see the furnace. WTF? Why would he need to see the furnace? He never really explained that need, but we searched the house for the opening in the ceiling to get up into the attic. It was then that I realized there was another level of idiocy to our other landlord. (There were two, partners, and one handled the paperwork while the other did the renovations and repairs on the house. They had some disagreements, and the one who did the work on the house bailed out of the partnership. But before he did, he did many stupid things to the house, and neglected to do things that needed to be done. For example, we have a hole in the bathroom wall where an electrical outlet should be. He never got around to doing the wiring in the bathroom, and so now the nearest outlet I can use to blowdry my hair is two rooms away, in the kitchen.) In the renovations of the house, the landlord put up beadboard in all the rooms as the ceiling. But he never left any opening into the attic. The only way you can get up there is to scale the wall on the outside of the house, and try to open one of the two small windows to the attic, and worm your way in. Our heroic a/c guy didn't have a ladder, so that was out of the question.

So he went back and examined the a/c unit again. He pointed out a layer of dusty dirt on the coil of the unit, asked if I had a garden hose, and hosed the unit down. Then he turned it on and checked to see if cool air was coming in through the vents. It was. AND THAT WAS IT! If someone had suggested to me that I should hose off the a/c unit before calling someone, I would have. The cost for the hosing of the unit? $200. And that's only because I had a $20 off coupon from the phone book. Sheesh. I should be an a/c repair person. I could make a load more money than I do as a teacher.

It took ages for the house to cool down. We left all the fans running the rest of the afternoon and evening, and it was still 89 degrees when we went to bed. We slept with the ceiling fan running (we don't usually do that because it wreaks havoc with my husband's allergies, and I wake up all stuffy too) and no blankets on the bed. But thankfully, it did ultimately cool down, and was 70 degrees this morning when we got up to start the day. I am sitting beneath the vent in our living room as I type this, and I can feel the wonderful breeze blowing down on me. I'll say it again: there is no greater invention in the history of mankind than the air conditioner. If you want to argue about it, I challenge you to sit in a 100-degree house all day, waiting for a repairman.