The One Thing I Don't Like About Summer...

...air conditioners.  To be more specific, I don't like window units.  They are loud (even the quietest of units), they never get the room to the temperature they're set at and they don't last long.

I admit that I've got some sort of strange phobia about them.  I never even thought it about it until I moved out of my family's home and on my own.  The house didn't have air conditioning.  It had been my grandparent's house and they had lived there for nearly 70 years (or at least my grandmother did) without any air conditioning.  (The house also had no shower either, just a bathtub, but that's another story.)  The first summer I didn't have any a/c.  My husband (than fiancé) would visit on the weekends in the summer and all he got was a fan.  But when he moved in that September, he brought his window unit with him.

It was a good unit, but an old one.  If I recall correctly it lasted from the time he moved in (late 1995 so we wouldn't have used it until the following year) until the summer my son was born (which would have been 2005).  That was a HOT summer; at least in my recollection.  Maybe having a newborn in the summer makes everything seem hotter.  Then it died and we immediately ran out and got a new one.  

Installing a new unit is never fun; especially when the old one has been sitting in the window for a long time. Inevitably, birds have managed to leave their "mark" no matter how many times we've tried to scare them away.  Removal of old unit is one of the nastiest things I can think of.  (It's right up there with clogged toilets and baby diaper explosions).

Trying to be "proactive" (don't you love the term?); we purchased a small unit for our son's room the next spring.  We expected a hot summer and we were not disappointed.  Since we only have units in the two bedrooms, we would schedule "play time" in the boy's room and "nap time" in our room.  Thus only needing for one unit to be on at a time during the heat of the day.  (Obviously both units were chugging away at night with the bedroom doors firmly shut to keep the cold in and the hot out.  In such a small house, it seemed like having a baby monitor wasn't really necessary, but with two window units running it certainly was.)

The boy's window unit kept his room nice and cool, but obviously we made a bad choice with ours.  It only last 4 measly years before crapping out.  I recall it vividly because it was the first day of the summer enrichment program at my son's new school.  We had enrolled him in the program so that he would get used the school as he would be attending kindergarten there in September.  We dropped him off and then went searching for an appropriate replacement. We only had 3 hours and needless to say, we found what we wanted at the last place we looked.  Which should have been the first since it was right in town! New A/C unit was purchased, but not installed until after the boy was picked up. (Three hours goes by quickly when you're trying to get something accomplished quickly.)

Which brings us to this summer.  Thankfully, it's been relatively cool.  We've used our unit much less than usual (thankfully) and my son's even less than that since he was away at camp for 2 weeks and down at the shore for 3.  But still, early in the season our unit started to make some strange noise. We shut it down for a while (in the middle of the night of course) and made sure to clean the filter again.  But it was enough to make me nervous.  (And for my husband to start researching units on line).

But it was the noise I DIDN'T hear this morning that meant bad news.  And surprisingly, it wasn't the unit in our bedroom, but the one in the boy's that had stopped working.  The unit was on, but nothing was happening.  Being that this is the end of the season, we considered NOT replacing it until the spring, but with temperatures supposedly hitting the upper eighties/low nineties over the next day or so...

So a new unit has been purchased, and on line no less!  Once again a gross old unit has been removed and a new one should soon arrive to take its place.  And with the purchase of yet another window unit, the temperatures probably WON'T soar as predicted.  (Wouldn't that be a good thing?)  But at least we'll be ready.  And at this point, I'm ALMOST ready to order a new one for our room and just keep it in reserve.  Because it will fail. And it will be the hottest, busiest day when it does. It will be the day when I least expect it and most need it.

For now, I'll just wait for that shoe to drop...(And not mention that my oven is over 30 years old.  Any predictions for Thanksgiving this year?)