June 27th, 2023

A Ceiling Fan!  Down here in the Sunshine State, fans are absolute essentials.  We have ours going year 'round.  In the summer the fans are in addition to Air Conditioning, in winter of course, window open and without AC.   We have ceiling fans in every room of the house, except bathrooms.  And this weekend, they got a real workout.

The weekend started out great!  Saturday was a Minock Day!  We drove up to our friends house, a couple of hours away, and spent a wonderful day with them.  We had lunch at a charming little place beside a river and we ate outside under the trees while watching turtles swimming by (and one alligator). We talked, we laughed, we caught up and had the best  time ever, as we always do.    We left much later than we intended (Time really does fly by when you are having a good time!) and got home a little after 9.    

Once we got home, in very short order,  we realized that it seemed to be warmer than usual inside.  Tim did a little checking and oh yeah, it was a whole lot warmer than usual.  Somehow, the Air Conditioning stopped working shortly after we left in the morning.  Oh dear.  Tim did what he could to try to nudge it back into functionality but nope, it wasn't happening.  This was a problem.

It was hot outside with almost no breeze and it was equally hot inside but at least inside we had the fans.  The fans were only circulating hot air, but a breeze is a breeze.   After a little testing, it appeared that the coolest room in the house was the new room, the family room, so clearly that was where we were spending the night.

It was 85 degrees in the family room (once again, the coolest room in the house) so getting comfortable wasn't easy.  I settled into my usual spot on the sofa, layed back against the cushions, closed my eyes and tried to think cool thoughts.  Poor Tim was miserable. He tried and tried to get comfortable but it just wasn't happening. 

Neighter of us really slept, we merely dozed and sweated, alternately.  Tim ended up laying on the floor which was probably the coolest spot (cold air sinks y'see) but any improvement was marginal.  It was a Long Hot Summer Night and not in a good way.

By dawn's early light,  with gritty sleep deprived eyes, we gave up trying to pretend to sleep and got set up for our day.  Tim resumed trying to get the AC to behave and I tried to think of something to do that didn't involve heating up the house even more.  So no doing laundry and No cooking.  Hmmmmmm.

Eventually, after all other attempts had failed, a phone call was made to an emergency AC guy.  There comes a point  when you gotta call in the experts and this was one of them.  The technician promised to be there by early afternoon.  So what do you do while you wait?  Not much.  We both attempted to do useful things, stuff on the gotta-do list but realized very quickly that once we started getting heated up working, there would be no way to cool down.  This was going to be a day of laying low.

I wore the coolest clothes I could think of and pinned my hair up.  While we waited, mostly we sat on the sofa reading, watching old re-runs on TV and sweating.  As the sun came up and got brighter and higher in the sky, we also watched the temperature gauge rise.  It was maddening.

At long last, our hero arrive in a white vehicle (not a white horse of course, but still thematically correct).  It took him about an hour to check and test, check and test so many different parts of the system and then finally seize on where the problem originated.   Once discovered, it was simply a matter of fixing it.  Which he did!  We gratefully paid the outrageous cost and sent him  on his way with many thanks.

Afterwards,  it was just a matter of waiting for the temperature to start to go back down.

​Just so you know, it took all day and well into the night.

As I said, it was a long hot summer night and honestly the only difference between this event and the 11 days without AC after Hurricane Irma in 2017, was that this time we still had power so we were saved by the fans.

I have seen so  very many decorating shows where the first thing the experts say in any room is to get rid of the ceiling fans. I vote no on that.  Not just no but hell no.  I don't care how they look esthetically, our ceiling fans stay. 

​Hope your weekend was much cooler :)