It is August in the San Gabriel Valley and though we haven’t had a day that hit one hundred degrees recently it has been in the nineties and the past couple of days have been Deep South humid.
Two days ago the air conditioner in our house stopped working. The diagnosis is not good: dead compressor. We’re looking at a large fix-it bill we can’t afford and it will probably be several more days before the fix is done.
I don’t like to complain for the sake of complaining and yet I do it. I think most of us do it because it must be human nature, which is a perfectly fine excuse for fishing for sympathy. But you know what drives me nuts? When I say something that evokes an apples-and-oranges response.
“Boy, it’s hot. I can’t wait for the AC to be working again,” I might say.
“When this house was built nobody had air conditioning,” is the likely reply.
Or…
“When we were little we didn’t have air conditioning, just those awful swamp coolers.”
Both of the responses are true, but so what? How does that help? We didn’t have AC when I was a kid and I’m sure I was uncomfortably hot. What has that got to do with the heat of now?
When our house was built in 1903 not only did they not have air conditioning, they didn’t even have swamp coolers. And, people dressed in multiple layers from throat to toe! I know this and I am grateful to be living now rather than then.
But dammit, I’m still sweating and unhappy about it!
And now, even I have no response for that.
I feel your pain. That is NOT an apples and oranges response. In case you didn’t notice, it’s apples and apples, or more appropriately for Southern California, you are receiving my complete oranges and oranges sympathy.
Try Arizona…it’s a dry heat
FROM May to Fricken October!
damn! I did it again didn’t I? That was another apple oranges sort of thing wasn’t it?
Sorry!
Suffer on Garth!
;-j