Mid August...

The air conditioner failed sometime Sunday afternoon. I don’t know exactly when, there was no bang, pop, screech, or puff of black smoke. Like the proverbial frog in a sauce pan, we just figured it out after a while. It simply was not cool in the house anymore. I checked the thermostat, It was set to maintain seventy two degrees, but the actual temperature read eighty four. It was seven o’clock on a Sunday evening, there would be no service call till Monday.
We did all the right things, checked the filter, removed panels, reset breakers, and fiddled endlessly with the overly-complicated thermostat.
We’ve never liked the thermostat, it has time zones. To set it you push mushy, multi-function, poorly - labeled buttons to establish desired temperature for each four hour period of a twenty four hour day. It takes forever. There is a button though that says ‘Hold’. It merely maintains the current setting until turned off. That is where it stays all year. We are using a two-hundred dollar sophisticated computational device as if it were a light dimmer. Too hot, up it a little, too cool, back down. The clock is many hours off and blinks angrily at us. We ignore it.
The thermostat has asserted and avenged itself; the outside compressor-big-noisy-fan thingy does not turn on, at all. The air blower works and responds to on/ off commands from the master controller, but the vented air is stale and exactly the same temperature as the damp, ambient air.
Sunday night sleep was sweaty and shallow. We employed our fans and hoped for a cool breeze that never came. Waking up many times during the night searching violently for a fresh cool corner of damp pillows, all blankets not only pushed aside, but tossed several feet from the bed as if they were the source of the stifling heat.
This heat wave was in it’s second week, most days reaching and teetering around one hundred, those days when it only made it to the mid-nineties seeming almost pleasant.
Monday morning, mouthwash, and toothpaste have warmed to a sickly unnatural state. The very walls of the efficient house now storing the warmth per their modern design. The steamy shower did not even fog the mirror. The only relief in sight; the drive to work. Angel would not be so lucky, the dogs don’t care for the heat, and this day would prove to be miserable for them. Angel called for service, of course they were backed up, busy, busy, busy, could we wait till Tuesday?
We have become soft, we recognized, our first house a Victorian monster in downtown Springfield had no air conditioning, at all, so poorly insulated and high-ceiling spacious that any attempt even to cool a single room would spin the electric meter off it’s expensive axis. At that time we had kids in the house, bitter, edgy, frustrated kids accustomed somehow to more comfort and luxury than they had actually ever experienced. I don’t recall struggling with the heat so much as I recall the kids complaining about it. It was what it was.
Monday, as Angel and the dogs suffered to stay less than miserable, I whiled away in my cubicle, concerned about their plight, but secretly soaking up and relishing every stale atom of air conditioned comfort.
I arrived home about six P.M, inside the house the temperature had risen to ninety four. Angel had purchased four more inexpensive box fans and scattered them at all angles through the great area, open to the living room, kitchen, dining room and foyer. This moved the air, as fans can only do, across the sweat to speed evaporation giving the sense, if not the reality of cooling. I bagged ice cubes and laid them in bowls in front of the fans. I hosed down the deck and sprinkled the front yard hoping that my meager understanding of thermodynamics and evaporation would make a difference. As the sun finally set, the temperature began to drop. Inside the house, by eleven, it had nose dived to eighty seven degrees. Outdoors the billions of insects that actually own and rule our acreage buzzed by and laughed at our plight, the inside of the modern insulated house was an easy five degrees warmer than the outside.
We were uncomfortable, but optimistic, celebrating each degree drop as it occurred with the attention and giddiness of kids watching an odometer zero out. A quick dip in the small tepid swimming pool and off to bed. Not much was said as mere chit-chat seemed to heat the air and add to the edginess. Our conversations are generally smart-alecky (from Angel’s side) and in this sultry state the quips seemed more barbed and personal than usual. So we each kept our tongues at bay, so as not to make a bad situation worse.
The watering and fanning seemed to work, sleep was not so difficult, or we were just too lethargic and drained to do anything else. The dogs awoke early though, even in the basement where it is always a bit cooler, and with their own set of fans, the comfort level was less than perfect. I left for work a bit early, once again the seventy three degree air whipping into my truck windows feeling much like the open doors in the frozen food section at a supermarket.
Now I sit in my cubicle, cool, comfortable, the service call scheduled for eight A.M. maybe. If not, if Angel must endure today’s expected one hundred and three high, I may not go home. I doubt she will stay there herself.
We have become weak and soft in our old age.

Follow-Up… 08/15. The service call took place at seven thirty and took a mere half hour. According to Angel “There was a rusty part that they said wasn’t really important anyhow, so they bypassed it.” By Tuesday evening the house was cool and the dogs and family were basking in the spoiled luxury of seventy one degree remanufactured air. Outside, a record was broken for the day: one hundred three degrees.