Tag: AC

  • The Air Conditioners

    The Air Conditioners

    The Summer heat is coming. It’s supposed to be 80 today, 85 on Wednesday, and 90 on Thursday. And then there is also the humidity that will come along as well. The hot, sticky, and smelly New York Summer is just around the corner.

    We are ready for it.

    We’ve had our A/C’s in the windows since early May. Those machines have been cleaned from top to bottom, and we even tested them on a day that was a very comfortable 80. It’s just a matter of time before we shut the windows, and turn them on.

    And when those windows get shut, they won’t open back up until September. It is like battening the hatches around here. The apartment will become this self-contained island of artificial air. It’s like being in a submarine, or a spaceship.

    When I was a kid growing up in Texas, our house had central A/C, as do almost all houses down there. It seems like the air ran non-stop, but I know that’s not true. There is a specific sound from my childhood that takes me back, and it’s the sound of the A/C unit clicking on, and the slow drone of the air moving through the vents. I can almost touch that sounds, it’s so tactile to me. I can feel that air blowing on me as a little kid playing in my room.

    Having lived in Texas, there really is a line of demarcation for Texans. There are the Texans like lived in the state before air conditioning, and then there are the Texans who lived with air conditioning. If you’ve experienced a Texas Summer, then you know that the Pre-A/C Texans were pretty tough people.

  • Hot in the City

    It was warm yesterday, but today it’s going to be hot in NYC. Like Summer hot. Early July hot. And we don’t have our A/C’s.

    Like reasonable people, who keep fooling themselves into thinking that the weather patterns of the past will continue into the future, we took all of our air conditioners out of our apartment at the end of September. You know, at the beginning of Fall, when everything starts to cool down. Normally, we don’t go and get the A/C’s out of storage until late May, and even sometimes into June. We should have just kept them in the widows, and suffered through our amazingly mild winter.

    Currently, we are in a three-day heatwave. Technically you can only call it a heat wave if the temp is above 90 degrees for three days in a row. But being that it was 85 yesterday, t will be 90 today, and then 88 on Friday, I think it is fair to say that it’s a heat wave. I mean, on Sunday the high was 55. I had a sweater on for god sakes. I was drinking coffee to stay warm at an Easter Egg Hunt with my kid.

    Now, I’m sitting by my window, in shorts and a shirt, praying that a breeze will come through, but it won’t because the new construction behind our building is killing the cross wind, and I think we are all going to die tonight.

    The only winner here is the kid because she’s going to get ice cream, pretty much all day, because nothing is better than ice cream on a hot day.