If your house, situated in the south, has the air conditioning go on the fritz, it won’t happen until the night before a 3-day holiday weekend.  There’s nothing like trying to fall asleep in an 85-degree bedroom.  All we needed was some malaria and mosquito netting around the bed and you could have mistaken our upstairs floor this weekend with the set of Apocalypse Now.  The scary thing is we avoided what would normally be a really hot weekend this time of year.  It “only” got up to the mid-80’s all weekend; otherwise we all would have been sleeping in the basement.

I simply can’t sleep when I sweat.  Even with the ceiling fan giving us decent airflow on top of us, it still was stifling.  You can’t open the windows when it’s this humid, otherwise it simply becomes even more oppressive even though it’s “fresher” air.  I’m sure there are people who like heat that seeps into every one of your pores but I personally like to cocoon up under a blanket while the room is cold.

On the bright side of looking at the situation, I’d rather have the AC go out in the summer than the heat go out in the winter.  Once you hit a certain temperature in a non-heated house, you have no choice but to go elsewhere.  I remember the first weekend we moved down here in January 2000 and the first weekend we were in our new home there was an ice storm that knocked out our power.  Once the house dipped to about 55 degrees, it simply became less of an “adventure” and more of a “If it gets any colder, how will my computer react?” and “How low can the temps go before our skinny, Spawn of Beelzebub, black cat starts to shake?”

Since we had nothing unpacked, and 60 degrees isn’t conducive to reading when you’re worried about 80 foot tall pine trees snapping in half and coming through your new living room ceiling, I turned on the mini-boombox we had and listened to the AFC and NFC championship games.  Even better was that as it turned dark in the middle of the second game, I lost the AM signal and then had nothing to kill time since I hadn’t stocked the house with beer yet!  Megan was working at the hospital so it was quite a chilly reception (literally) I got from the city upon moving here.

Maybe that should have tipped me off.