Raising the Herd

It sucks two nights ago the AC ran all night set at 72 and it never got cool. So yesterday we turned it off to let it thaw out and cleaned the filters and when we turned it on about 5ish it didn’t cool. I’d been okay up to that point, but the girls were getting cranky and I was too. I took a cold shower and I never take cold showers. Kathleen joined me and Samantha played a little bit but didn’t get too wet, but more than I had expected.

At 7ish, we drove up to Hurley to the inlaws to get three window units. We’d used these after Katrina and had just a few months back taken them up to there for storage. Shea’s dad met us about 3/4s of the way up with them and we drove home, installed the units. We have two in our room and one in Samantha’s (which will end up being both of the girls room again here soon.)

At first the one in Sam’s room wasn’t cooling it wasn’t set right but at that time I had already started blowing up the air matress and the girls were set to sleep on it. So we let them stay in here with us. I’m not sure if they will sleep in Sam’s room alone, Kathleen isn’t big on the door being shut and it’ll have to be so we don’t kill the electric bill.

So today the big AC is off, and we’ll be spending all day in our room. Thankfully the room is nice and big and we can all be comfortable. I’ve got most of my stuff to work on for one of my clients set up on my laptop. It’ll be a bit difficult to do but it beats sitting at my desk in the heat.

I’ll be calling the AC guy today to get a price estimate on 2-3 pounds of freon and we hope that’ll get us through the rest of the summer. Hopefully by the end of the week we’ll have our AC back and things will get back to normal. But if I can stay cool but stay in one room most of the time I can manage it, we’ve done worse and I can move the PCs into the bedroom. We’ve plenty of room. We already have our queen bed, one small desk, a dresser drawer system with the TV on it, two smaller dressers with the girls clothes in it, and the queen blow up matress and still enough room to walk and pile clothes etc up in the corner lol. One more desk won’t take up any more room, we’ll just have to rearrange some of the “piles” to get it in here, but that won’t be an issue if we have to do it.

We will probably have to replace the AC in whole next summer so we pray that we’ll be able to save money to do so. Wish us luck cause we don’t currently have that kind of money to save up.

On a side note, it was much cooler outside last night than it was in the house, so we spent a hour or so cleaning up the back porch and if it is not to hot out today I’ll take the girls out on the porch to do some swimming. Unfortunately there will be no swinging or anything out in the grass. It’s not been dry enough to mow so the lawn is too high and the moment you step out into the grass you get eaten alive by whatever little bugs like to live in tall grass. But the pool will be more than enough for Kathleen and if it’s too warm Samantha as well.

While we were cleaning, one of the share was sporting a very dangerous friend. We were cleaning it off with the hose to get all the dirt and cob webs off, and as Shea set it down there was a huge spider on it. As we were in the process of getting it off to squish it we both noticed that it was a black widow. I was more concerned at that time to kill it before it got near the kids to realize that I’d just moved the chair and was paranoid the rest of the evening while cleaning and moving things around. I do not like spiders and I most definitely am afraid of black widows, I’m just glad it’s dead and hopefully didn’t lay any eggs. What’s funny is that Rae and I were discussing spiders and I had mentioned that I was pretty sure I could identify one (black widow), and yep I sure enough did. I am very thankful that I was tired enough last night that I didn’t have nightmares about them.