51 Minutes Till Sunset

Sometime today our air conditioning went out. Our beautiful, ten-month old air conditioning system. In Austin. In July. On a day when it was 99 degrees outside. Ugh.

This picture of Dewey, an awesome semi-Siamese who ran away long ago,
represents both the relative age and current working ability of our a/c unit.
I still miss that cat. 

The house is so well insulated that it took us until 3:00 to discover the problem. A quick trip to the store for new filters, a quick trip to the fuse box, staring seriously at the a/c unit as though if we looked hard enough, the furnace would pull a Goblet of Fire move and spit out the diagnostics: sadly, none of these tactics worked. It took a few hours for the company to send a representative, but eventually he came and diagnosed the problem as a blower motor and circuit board issue, which was, frankly, a relief, because there was no way we could've been expected to figure that out on our own. Unfortunately, the shop wasn't open, so we are spending a very warm evening, counting the minutes until sunset.

As it happens, I know just how to deal with a broken air conditioner, because, for two of my three years in college I lived in a house with no central air and only these weird wall furnaces that you lit, very carefully, with a match for heat in winter. (Our preferred approaches to using the furnace were, (1) not to, unless it was really, really, really cold, and (2) to barely turn on the gas and hold out a super long match stick while lunging in the opposite direction so that if the wall exploded we could try doing a James Bond roll out the front door.)

Yes, I said three years. When you're a total nerd and love
school, you get so excited every semester when the new
course catalog comes out and wind up going year round,
eventually graduating in three calendar years--at the age of 20--
with about 20 hours more than you needed to graduate,
even after having switched majors and everything. 

So why would any sane person wind up in an un-air conditioned house in central Texas in 1990? Well, for starters, I enrolled at A&M too late to get a dormitory, so my first year was in an apartment. After that, somehow I stumbled across an ad for a two-bedroom house in North Gate for $285 per month. As a true Conces, those tiny, tiny numbers melted my cheap, cheap heart.

Sydney, my cat, looking for bugs in the garden. Kari and I,
neo-hippies that we were, tried valiantly to grow our own
food. Free spirited and absent minded ditzes that we were,
we failed. Miserably. But the cats had a good time.

These were a couple of streets of identical houses with matching gray siding, rented out by a management company to that select group of students who were willing to sacrifice comfort and, frequently, dignity, for really, really cheap rent. I lived there two years, first with Ursula, a rather unfriendly girl who communicated mainly via Angry Post-it Notes, and then with a girl named Kari.

We learned early on that the management company was not particularly interested in making repairs. However, our house was next door to one that was so dilapidated that no one would rent it. The management company didn't bother to keep the house next door locked, possibly because the multiple holes in the exterior walls, interior walls, and floors made that essentially pointless. Or maybe the locks didn't work. Either way, we came to regard that house as sort of a free Home Depot and raided it for oven knobs, outlet covers, towel bars, window screens, and other items we needed in our house. Shortly before I graduated, a group of male architecture majors moved into the house next door, as sort of a cheap-living-arrangement-plus-class-project deal and we had to go to Real Home Depot.

Sydney in the living room. I adopted that cat as a adult from
the Bryan Animal Shelter in 1989 and he lived to be almost
21 years old. His best trick was fetching wadded up pieces
of paper and bring them back to you.

Anyway, summers in Bryan were pretty brutal, but we survived, mainly by:

• Reminding ourselves about all the money we weren't spending on rent,
• Fans, lots and lots of fans,
• Taking frequent cold showers,
• Wearing nothing but underwear,
• Putting wet towels on our heads, and, most critically,
• Being somewhere--anywhere--else whenever possible.

Fortunately, we had boyfriends with air conditioning, and, between their houses and summer school, we survived. We both had long-haired orange tabby cats, who were considerably less happy about it, but we gave them frequent baths and they lounged around on the linoleum most of the time anyway.

Can you feel the love? Can you FEEL it?

What this means is that, unlike most Texans of my generation, I can say that I've lived without air conditioning for a couple of years, which makes tonight's lack of a/c no big deal. I've got fans, ice packs, and pink lemonade. Most important of all, I know you can survive heat, sweat, and humidity with your sense of humor intact, so long as you're with the ones you love.

Sydney Carton (my cat) and Trinity (Kari's cat), sharing a window.
Trinity's best trick involved a dark closet and a stuffed bear and
is not appropriate for general audiences.