In the dark with sweating cheese
 

So... I worked for 9 and a half hours straight today, no chance to eat breakfast or lunch. I did, however, manage several glasses of water.

When I finally finished the critical tasks I'd been doing all day, my usual ten-minute drive home took 45 minutes because it's sort of sprinkling, and a major intersection was on flashing red lights.

When I get home, the door is unlocked (and my husband isn't home yet.) Also, the house is swelteringly hot. I was completely convinced that there was a rapist/murderer inside waiting for me, and I literally had 911 already on my cellphone with my thumb on the Talk button while I carefully searched the whole house.

Back to the swelteringly hot thing: the air conditioner has apparently gone out. Texas in August, this means it's 88 degrees inside the house.

So I'm eating cheese and crackers to finally get some food in my stomach, and I'm doing so in the dark to avoid even the slightest additional lightbulb heat. I am, on the other hand, willing to have one computer on. :)

And the cheese is sweating profusely.

The possible rapist/murderer is not funny. However, the sweaty :cheese: is kinda funny!

Have you figured out why the was house unlocked? Did the cats work together to flee outside to escape the oppressive heat?

That Mother of all Satens, aka Walmart, sells air conditioners starting at only $60.00. Granted, one that size will cool off only a single room, but you could leave your cheese there while waiting for the AC repairman. (Tell any would be rapists to go buy their own AC).

When I saw the title of this thread I thought it was the world's first case of thread spam.

In the dark with sweating cheese

seems too much like these titles:

To finish be imperceptible
Re: was lose go gavel besmirch
Re: noisemake, Let me give you some advice

Well, although I feel your pain, I think I should point out that it is in the triple digits here in Kansas and it gets to 120 if you don't have air conditioning. So it could be a lot worse. ;) Good luck on the air conditioning!

Just tell the rapist, when the weather's hot and sticky, that's no time for dunkin'....... ;)

Or rape him. Who says the person who lives in the house has to be the victim? Stick his head in the oven, turn it on low and give him a mop handle for his trouble. Bet he stays at his own house next time.

The going assumption is my husband left it unlocked when he left the house in the morning.

I've got to admit, we've had a surprisingly nice summer down here. It only broke a hundred sporadically, nothing like the 40-days-straight-over-100 statistics that we usually get. And I think we're setting records for amount of rain in August.

But the good news is, the A/C is back online (literally, we have a city-controlled thermostat) and it only cost $129 to fix. This is an old house, and I was really afraid the whole compressor had gone out and it was going to be $500-$1000 or something.

They will take away my ability to set my thermostat when they take the controller out of my cold dead hands in the summer, or my warm dead hands in the winter.

Eh... all they can do is temporarily shut it off if the power plant is threatening to overload. When it overloads, someone's losing their power anyway. It's like rolling blackouts, but much more polite. :)

They gave us a free high-tech programmable thermostat out of the deal, and they have a contract that says they can't turn it off for more than ten minutes at a time, and only ever between the hours of 4:00 and 6:00 in the evening. Most of the time we're not home then anyway. And they send us a report at the end of the year that notifies us of exactly when they had to shut it off, and so far it's only been once each year.

Cool. I never heard of such a thing. It sounds very intelligent and seems to be implemented very well.

Of course, once the thermostat is installed, there is always the chance that it will turn in to a slippery slope. Sure, you have a strict contract now, but I can envision a less scrupulous city/utility deciding to hold off on building that new power plant for another decade because they can always increase the rolling "blackouts" they do on all the thermostats around town. Eventually the AC might only be on for a few hours total each day. Path of least resistance, and all.

Come to california where everything's wonderful! No sweaty cheese! Happy cows, swimming pools, and movie stars!

I discovered that our AC had gone out at about 10:00 last night. It doesn't cool our office well to begin with, but when it hit 90 in there I got sorta curious and found that the outside unit was not running. While my cheese is comfortably housed in a cool refrigerator, the rest of our non-lactate family is hurting.

We live in that triple digit area Cowhead mentioned, and if it gets up to 120 degrees in my house, my Oscars are gonna die. Repairman comes this afternoon. Pray for something cheap. This is our third AC unit in six years.

What the hell is a city-controlled thermostat, and why would you put up with such a thing?

The thermostat, provided/installed/maintained-for-free by the city, is connected via some type of network to the power plant. They have the ability to shut my A/C off if the city (or area, I guess) as a whole is using too much power and the power plant is approaching overload capacity. Cutting a couple thousand people off for ten minutes at a time each is apparently enough to keep the system from overloading.

I put up with it because having a programmable thermostat means that we save at least $50-$75 a month on our electric bill, because we can program it to a much higher (or lower, in the winter) temperature during the day when we're not home, and program it to start cooling again an hour before we get home. I could have purchased and installed a programmable thermostat on my own, of course, but that would have cost around $250 all told.

And like I said, it hasn't ever been a nuisance. Before we signed up I talked to several other people who were already part of the program and they were all happy with it. It could always turn into a slippery slope like glatt said, but I could also always just pay to replace their special thermostat.