It's Not the Heat...

The rest of that expression is "...it's the humidity." Since I live in what would probably be considered the "Deep South", I am familiar with both heat and humidity. We are in the midst of a rather serious drought, but we've had rain (sometimes "locally heavy" according to the weather folks) almost every afternoon for the past five or six days.

When the lady who takes care of me ("cleaning lady" is not nearly comprehensive enough to explain what she has meant to our family over the past fifteen months) came Monday, I turned the temperature down to 72 degrees while she was working. I was gone on business for a while, and when I got home, it was pretty certain to us that the air conditioner was NOT working properly. We got the filter changed (it was awful; I hadn't thought about it during the months after DH passed), but that didn't help. She works part-time for a heating/cooling company, and she called them to arrange for a service call on Tuesday.

To make a long story short (my dear daddy and I were never very good at making any story short, but I'm trying), the service man couldn't get here until this morning. The dog and I sweated through Monday afternoon and all day yesterday, until I remembered the window unit that is in our master bedroom (and why did it take so long for me to think of that, you ask? My brain is still sometimes in a fog...). So I've spent the last thirty-six hours camped out in my bedroom...which is really more of a master suite, with a television and VCR/DVD, lovely club chairs, and access to my wireless internet. The dog doesn't like staying in here, because the unit is noisy, and she thinks it's related to her enemy, the vacuum cleaner.

The service man checked the breakers, the compressor, etc., and gave me the not-so-good news. I can spend $1200 or $2800; the $1200 will probably get me a couple of years unless something else goes wrong, and the $2800 will get me a ten-year warranty. Will I be here another ten years...I don't know, but if I spend $1200 and then something else goes wrong, I'll end up putting more money into the unit, and probably ending up having to spend the $2800 farther down the road. It was still rainy and stormy today, so he will be here in the morning to do the work.

I lived alone for more than twenty years before I married DH, but I also had my father (who lived next door) to consult before I made big decisions. DH sometimes teased me about being too independent after we married, but I broke down and cried this morning and wanted him here to help me make this decision.

A little girl in my Sunday School class once told me that she couldn't wait to be a grownup so that she could do whatever she wanted. I laughed, and told her that grownups STILL can't do what they want...we have to try to do the right thing and the best thing, and those are not usually the easy things.

On a lighter note, the shoes that I ordered from HSN came this afternoon, and they're just as cute in person as they were on the website...