(Not So) Cool

One of the best quirky things about our house is that for some reason the air conditioning is most generous to the master bedroom. I'm not sure why; we have the same number of vents that the other bedrooms have, and all the vents in every room are opened, but I'll admit I don't want to do too much searching. I like feeling refrigerated. I love that though the thermostat is set to 78, my room feels more like 70. It's heaven.

I was enjoying the coolness yesterday afternoon while taking a nap after Church. Cold sheets, cold pillow--sheer bliss. In the evening we went to the home of a man in our ward who is a retired astrophysicist for JPL and who has written several books on planets and planetary rings and whose library walls are covered with framed awards and honors from NASA. He had an incredible Powerpoint presentation to show us, and he taught us all kinds of blow-your-mind type of stuff about the immensity of space, but the point of me telling you this is to get to the fact that when we got home, around 10pm, it was hotter upstairs than when we left, even though the A/C was running. The air coming out was not cold, and I was not happy.

Me no like hot.

We turned off the unit and I tried to swelter to sleep, but I just couldn't do it. All I could think about was how it was 109 degrees today and it's supposed to be hot all week long, and how grouchy I get when it's hot with no relief. I was having flashbacks of four years ago when we moved into this house in August, having been told that it had air conditioning, when in fact it did not. I remembered how that happened to be the summer of record-breaking heat, and how we sat there, newly married, having only just met 10 weeks earlier, staring at each other and our 5 red-faced, sweaty kids, nearly dying of heat stroke while everything we owned was stacked in boxes all around us. I remembered how our cat almost died. He wouldn't eat, he wouldn't drink, he just layed there. We'd have to put him in a tub of cold water every day just to keep him from slipping into a heat-induced coma.

It was awful. We didn't get the promised air conditioning until March of the next year.

I cannot do that again. For real.

At 1:30am, I took a pillow and went downstairs to sleep on the couch where, thankfully, it was cooler. At 3:30am, I had just barely dozed off to sleep when the lights were flung on in the livingroom and I about scared Adam to death as he came down for a middle-of-the-night snack. He hadn't even come to bed yet, as he was working, so he didn't know I'd come downstairs to sleep. You should have seen how much air he caught in his terror of hearing a voice yell, "Hey!" at 3:30 in the morning when he turned on the light. I'm still laughing about it. Fear reactions (after the fact, of course) have got to be one of the funniest things ever.

Anyway, not much sleep last night. At 7am it was already 84 degrees upstairs. It's going to be a long day. I put in a call to our landlord and begged him to save us.

Now we wait. And sweat. I'm so, so tired. But I'm afraid that if I fall asleep I may never wake up again.

Death might be better.