Life Updates

Oh, hello!  We had quite a week here.  The big news is…. our AC died. Now, if you don’t live in Florida I’m not sure you can appreciate the scope of this tragedy.  Floridians take their AC very seriously.  At my daughter’s band concert in Tallahassee, the conductor started by acknowledging everyone who made the camp possible, and he said “The first person I’d like to thank is the man or woman who invented air conditioning.” AC is so crucial to us, we just call it “air.”  Put the air on!  Turn the air down!  I’m pretty sure you couldn’t live here without AC (air.) We had been noticing that our unit was struggling to keep up with the record breaking heat.  But other people said the same thing, so we were a little concerned, but trying to be hopeful that all was okay.  But on Sunday, we realized we were roasting, looked at the thermostat (which was set at 75) and saw that it was 87 degrees in the house.  NOOOOOOOOOOOO!!! After several brilliant and high-tech attempts to fix it (let’s turn it off and turn it back on!  Maybe it will start working again when it gets dark!) we had to face the sad facts.  We opened the windows, turned on all the fans, and put in a call to our AC people. They came bright and early Monday morning, gave us the bad news- several major parts had to be replaced- and said they would be back THE NEXT DAY to fix it.  Sob. I could go into all the gory details about how uncomfortable those days were, but let’s just fast forward to Tuesday night: the AC was fixed, we were several thousand dollars poorer, and the whole sad saga was over. In other news, my daughter’s septum piercing is healing up well, in spite of the fact that she keeps moving it around.  The guy who did the piercing told her not to play with it, because it would take longer to heal.  It’s very hard to resist though, because she says it’s like a “built-in fidget toy.”  Yes, a built-in fidget toy, IN HER NOSE.  Gee, I wonder why I was opposed to this.  Anyway, after six weeks she’ll be able to change the jewelry, and she’s looking forward to getting spikes.  ARRRRRRRRG! Lastly, my “summer of reading” seems to have evolved (devolved?) into the “summer of Orson Scott Card.”  I finished Xenocide, looked at my stack of library books, thought “who am I fooling?” and picked up the next in the Ender series, Children of the Mind.  I had to return Hello Beautiful to the library unread, but that’s okay- I can read it later. How’a your summer going?  Is your AC working??? What are you reading now?