Hell has come

Posted on July 21, 2009 in Daily Life Weather

I woke up noticing that I was sweating. It wasn’t a fever — not an under-the-skin intense burning but an enclosing of my body by warmth. My body responded by oozing liquid through its pores. It did not register to me while I slept that temperatures were too high. I rolled over a few times, kept the cycle of dreams going. When I did finally wake up, I still did not catch on to the fact of the day: the air conditioner was broken.

I tried a few things first. I turned on the overhead fan in the bathroom so that the hot air trapped in the hall would be spirited into Southern California’s already hot sky. This helped just a little. Then I worried that the cooling line had frozen up. So I shut the air conditioner off for half an hour. I was never able to get it back up.

When I went downstairs to check things out, the central air unit was as still as a dead fish floating in an overheated tank. I pulled out the fuses and reinstalled them, flicked the switches on and off. Next I fooled with the breakers. The unit did not respond to any of these machinations. It was dead dead dead.

I chewed out someone who was on my side. He persevered with me and made his case clear. Good man. I apologized and he forgave me. Very good man. I said some unkind things about him.

I have a call in to the people our home warranty company assigned to our case. My plan is to sleep with my cell phone next to my head. Outdoor temperatures are in the nineties and low hundreds. I shall beg for respite and if the wait for service is going to be long, beg Lynn to allow me to take Doggy to a motel. (The cats have survived this before.)

Hell has come to me. But I burn for no particular sin, just random chance and lack of capital to bring help at my beck and call.