Air, please.

When you live as far south as we do, the one thing you definitely don't want to happen (or at least one thing I didn't want to happen) is for your air conditioner to die on you in the middle of summer. July and August were made bearable only by the constant running of all three of the window units we have here in our cottage and even though its now September and the temperature has cooled slightly, its nowhere near cool enough to go without A/C. So, guess what happened Friday afternoon, about the time I got home from work?

Yep. You guessed it. The window unit in the dining room, which happens to be the largest of the three and responsible for cooling the whole downstairs, died. it had been acting sick for a few days so its passing wasn't entirely unexpected. It had been giving what Zack described as a "death rattle" for the past week or so, and making lots of other funny groaning sounds too. I was hoping it would just hold out for another month or so, until it was a little bit cooler but no such luck.

You can probably imagine, at least to some extent, what it's been like for us this weekend. We have leather couches which means that we literally have to kind of peel our bare skin off of them after we've been sitting for more than a couple minutes. Everything in the house has a fine film of condensation on it now, which is pretty gross and the other night when Zack was making dinner and cut a couple slices of butter to use for sauteeing vegetables, it melted in the pan before he even turned the burner on underneath it.

I know that there are hotter places we could live...my cousins out in Phoenix can attest to that and I'm sure that the heat out there is even worse than it is here so I shouldn't complain too much. Here in New Orleans though, it's not the heat so much as the humidity that'll kill you. We had planned to only use the air conditions sparingly; to turn them down when we weren't home or during the day when we were in other parts of the house. The problem, we discovered very shortly after moving in, is that its so darn humid down here that if the A/C isn't running at basically full-blast at all times, everything gets damp and musty. There's nothing worse than living through the heat all day long then crawling into what you hope will be a nice cool bed at night, only to find that the sheets are practically dripping with moisture. Oh, who am I kidding? The heat down here is every bit as bad as the humidity.

So the A/C decides to die at about 5 p.m. on the Friday of a holiday weekend. Our chances of getting it replaced before Tuesday were looking pretty bleak. It's now Sunday afternoon and lo and behold our landlords have managed to find someplace open over the weekend to buy a new unit. Zack is downstairs helping them install it as we speak. I'm hiding out upstairs until I'm sure they're finished. I've been sweating down there for two days just sitting...I'm not too excited at the thought of manual labor!