Is it really only Wednesday?!

Stop the world, I wanna get off!

Last Friday--only six days ago!--we got the call. Our air conditioner was FINALLY in.

Yes, I know, not all that long ago I wrote that the mere act of using an air conditioner smacked of selfishness. And it does. However, this summer has smacked us in the face...forty-seven times now. That's the number of nights the outside temperature has failed to drop below 20 degrees. And we've had about enough.
We have been waiting six weeks for this portable air conditioner. The demand is so high that they had to make more of them. In fact, we've visited Wal-Mart and Canadian Tire and even stooped so low as to go into a Zellers. No air conditioners. No fans, either, in two of those places.
The Brick had what looked like a good one online, so we went in to buy it. As the signature hit the sales receipt, we were informed of the (ahem) four week wait.

Nice.

Four weeks passed, wiltfully. With two days to go and us sweating out the minutes, the call came: they weren't ready...it'd be another two weeks.

Nicer.

That brought us to last Friday. And on Saturday, we went to pick it up.

It's a behemoth...the warehouse workers are quite certain it won't fit into our Echo. Harold, not for the first time, proves them wrong...although it *is* a very tight fit.

So we get it home and put it in our library Once it's in place, setting it up is actually much easier than setting up a window one. You still need an intake and exhaust vented to the outside. These are big monster hoses along the lines of a dryer hose. They connect to a vertical slat that rests in your window, with the exhaust hose venting to the top (so the heat rises away from the intake.)
It's very powerful, and has dehumidifier and fan settings.

It also leaks.

Yes, I know, all air conditioners leak, especially if you set them too high and they freeze up. But this one is leaking from someplace it shouldn't: the back right corner, at a join.
I first noticed something wrong about two hours after we turned it on. I went up to check and see how cool it was. It was blessedly cool...a far cry from the 29 degrees that the display was reading. (When I'd first turned it on, the room temperature was 23, and it felt decidedly cooler than that.) So I looked at the thing a little more closely and noticed a big wet spot underneath it.

Oh, joy.

There are two tanks, an internal water tank that functions to keep the coils cool and the external tank at the back that you pull out and empty. Both tanks were bone dry--which I figure may explain the "thermomistat" malfunction. But I have no idea why it's leaking, except Murphy's Law and the knowledge that everything you buy involving water in any way at all leaks. (I've yet to hear about anyone installing a dishwasher without creating at least one lake in their kitchen in the process.)

I was actually surprised they didn't make me bring the damn thing back. They're delivering a replacement this Friday.

I would have told you all this Monday night, dear blog, but my computer died.
It's all of four months old: the last thing I expected it to do was freeze solid...and upon a hard reboot, inform me my hard drive was missing. But it did just that, and with a smirk on its face, too. Tech support told me my hard drive was defective (d'ya think?) and I should bring it back for a replacement.
So off to MDG it went. Of course, after a day's testing, they called me to let me know that nothing was wrong. Everything checked out fine. They had no problem booting it up. I explained to them--again--what had happened to me...we hemmed and hawed, and they allowed as how a connection might have been dodgy.

Fixed now.

We hope.

In between all that, a very successful yard sale (which in itself entailed a lot of work). Eva got a fairly large dragon tattoo on her right shoulder: a grey dragon with blue eyes, gaurding a clutch of four eggs. One egg contains a lightning bolt, to symbolize me (my love of weather); the second contains a paw print, which denotes Eva's love of animals; the third has a drop of water because Eva would live in the water if she could. The fourth egg is empty, symbolizing the child we almost had.
She had it done at Tora Tattoo (www.toratattoo.com) --and they did a magnificent job.

That's just our week. Several friends of ours have had weeks much, much worse.

And I have to work this Saturday because we're running the biggest ad in the history of the chain. Details on that later--they won't be pretty.