Stupid Failure of a $10 Piece of Rubber

Fewer things destroy my will to live faster than heat and humidity. I have never been a Southern flower who thrives in the heat wearing a white, cotton shift, fanning herself in a rocking chair on the veranda drinking iced tea. No. My people must have been Nordic people who melted if the thermometer sped past 90 and whose lungs could not distill oxygen out of air with more than 30% humidity. There is a reason Leif Ericson found Greenland and Labrador instead of South Beach.

I have been just this side of miserable even with the air conditioning because you can only cool the air so much. Hubby decided to put a remote display thermometer in the attic. It hit 140 the other day, so he turned on the attic fan to cool it down to under 100. When I walked under it on my way to the bathroom, it was like walking under a blast furnace.

In addition to the whole hotter than Hades in a hot day in hell issue, we have also had some of those problems related to home ownership. First the electric lawn mower died from natural causes. I always thought it would die from electricity loss due to cord amputation, but I was wrong. After using my mad knitting dexterity skills to reassemble the switch assembly, the mower still didn’t spring to life. We have yet to bury the thing, but it is dead. I stopped at Lowes on my way to work one morning and wrestled a new lawn mower into the trunk of the car. Hubby really likes this lawn mower. He claims it is better and quieter – although how would he know he looks like a giant bug with his noise cancelling head phones on.

Then the hot tub has been acting up a little bit – although it has been so hot the thought of sitting outside in the heat in a tub of hot water is less than thrilling. We need to get new filters for that.

Then there was the “mild” flooding of the basement and Man Cave that happened when I was getting ready for this week’s knit night.

On the one hand I feel grateful that we did not have the problems a lot of other people did when the monsoon hit on Tuesday. On the other hand, it was tres annoying that the water got in the basement because the flashing (a $10 piece of equipment) under the basement door did not do its job (a $100 worth of annoyance).

We have dried it out to the best of our ability. Memo to self – do not expect a wet dry vac to actually suck up enough water out of a carpet to make it dry. Wet dry vac only means you can use it vacuum up Cheerios spilled out of the box or Cheerios and milk from a bowl. Now we have the whole got to rent the carpet cleaner thing to treat the carpets with some vinegar and cleaning solution or do we just rip up the carpet drama to endure this weekend. Yeah!

Through all of this, there is the added bonus of the heat and humidity that makes everything so much more pleasant because one’s clothes are sweat drenched and one’s temper is on a vacation. Yeah right.

To keep my sanity, I have been reading books and working on a cotton baby blanket for one of the women at work. So far it seems to be working, but that could change at any moment.