It has come to my attention that either in a previous life, or as a child, I was a complete jackass. Offending God or perhaps just someone who has it in good with the Big Guy, I must have done my part to deserve this. At least that is the only way that I can explain what’s happening.
Saturday morning, after getting up at 6 a.m. to be the primary audience for the first run of “Jonas and the Amazing Barkettes” show, The Wife™ and I set to finding things to do to keep ourselves awake. Coffee in hand, we got working and by 10 a.m. had fully cleaned the kitchen, our bathroom, and several other rooms in the house. It felt great. So naturally continuing on this roll of productivity, I decided to knock out the yard work which had been dreadfully neglected. It has rained incredible amounts over the past week, so our grass was looking like the windswept prairies of Kansas. Out the door by 10:30, I was prepared to tackle it.
By 11:45, dripping from head to toe in what I like to call “The West Coast Has No Idea What 94% Humidity Means” sweat, I blew the final grass clippings off the driveway and headed inside for a glorious shower and to soak up the air conditioning. That is, of course, if it were working. Which it wasn’t. Which is why I’m now one snide comment shy of cracking.
The Faust household (read: me) is apparently cursed. When unfortunate things happen, they rarely occur in an isolated fashion. Instead, everything breaks when one thing breaks. And in the month and a half of moving into the house, (with all but one happening just this week) we’ve had the air conditioning fail, the garage door break, the car die and the garbage disposal crap out. And to top it off, as I’m unpacking my new equipment to finally start brewing beer after waiting patiently for over a year…I break the hydrometer. Awesome. Now I don’t even have beer to console myself with when thinking about how we’ll pay for the other eleventy-billion things in need of repair.
And while I summon every fiber of self-control and restraint in not feeling sorry for our situation, and trying not to whine, I can’t help but laugh at the fact that the week the A/C decides to go to Fiji on vacation is consequently the hottest week of the summer thus far. I mean, if you were a deity with the power to exact revenge, wouldn’t you choose a week where temperatures with heat indexes were well over 100F, and humidity at a staggering 80-plus percent? It couldn’t be a better time for this to happen, really. The only quasi-positive thing that could be taken from this is that the dog is slowing down, likely due to being just shy of the point of passing out. He must think he really did something wrong to make us take away That Which Makes Existence Bearable and Cool, as he’s panting heavily at 6 a.m. after an evening of not even moving. I tried explaining to him that it was 84 in the house and that it might not get better for a few days, but as I was talking, he walked over to his bowl and proceeded to put both feet directly into his water dish and stare at me. I took this to mean that he was either not happy, hot, or perhaps both.
At any rate, if anyone tries to get in touch with me this week and are unable, it’s probably just that I have Time and Temperature on constant redial, waiting to see if the heat advisory has been lifted. Or that I’m busy explaining to Jonas that he can’t get inside the freezer, no matter how hard he might try.
