Oh, Chickens, is it officially summer where you are? Because Chicago skipped right over Spring, bringing us straight from May snow to May hot and muggy. Blergh.
But I am happy to report that while I am a bit sticky at the moment, help is coming.
Because, AIR CONDITIONING.
I may have mentioned before that Freon is my biggest vice. I don't just like my house cool in the summer swelter, I want to be able to hang meat in the bedroom. I keep my car temp on low and the fan on high from June through September. I worship at the feet of air conditioning.
Ironic that I have lived over 20 years in a home without central air, no?
For the past few years, every May my dear handyman Tony would arrive to schlep the five window units and their custom plywood window platforms up from the basement where I would clean off the gunk and rinse out the filters and he would get them into my windows with a complicated series of scraps of wood, and pieces of foam to fill in the gaps and racks. One 18,000 BTU commercial monster in the living room, and then normal ones in both bedrooms, the dining room and the kitchen. I would set all of them for 70 and leave them running nonstop day and night without ever turning them off until mid October. Then in late November, sure that no more random heatwaves would descend, Tony would return to undo the whole process. Complicated, annoying, deeply unattractive, but the apartment? Nice and cool from end to end.
But no more. Because tomorrow the HVAC guys come to install two enormous compressors to attach to our forced air system, and my contractor has promised me arctic chill by tomorrow night.
Which is good, because a couple more days of hot and muggy and just a little damp here at the old homestead, and I might be tempted to call Tony to go get the old gear out of storage and give a girl a little relief.
Keep your fingers crossed that by weeks end I can report back that we are having a polar vortex in my living room.
And while it is a day late, I do want to take a moment to publicly remember the servicemen and their families who gave the ultimate sacrifice for our country. I salute you all.
Yours in Good Taste,
The Polymath
My aunt runs her a/c so cold she has to replace the old unit with a new one pretty much annually. My dad finally reminded her that a/c units are only designed to keep the indoor temps up to 20 degrees lower than the outdoor temps. She's been running hers into the ground for years.
ReplyDeleteI do like to sleep under the covers in the summer too. Takes some freon to make that happen!
ReplyDeleteGrowing up in the 50's in D.C. meant hot, humid summers, damp pillows, no air and very little sleep. The new "houses of the future" in our neighborhood had no cross ventilation and small windows. When we finally got those precious window units, I fell in love with cool summer nights. I still open the windows to smell spring, but once the temp gets over 74, I'm all AC all the time!
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