Thought That Came Unbidden

I miss my bed. I really do. For the past four days it has been near or over 100degF here and I’ve been sleeping on the sofa bed in my living room. Why? Simple: the air conditioner in my bedroom sounds like a jet engine spooling up for takeoff, and that’s from downstairs in the living room.

My house is 85 years old and doesn’t have central AC. When I moved in I priced a retrofit central air conditioning system, the kind with the circular flexible ductwork, and the sales guy took a look around my empty house and told me that because I had “lots of room in the closets” it was going to be a low cost job, only $15,000.

Do you know how many window units you can buy for $15,000?

In the 14 years I’ve lived in this house, I don’t think I’ve spent even a quarter of that on air conditioners. But lately I’ve been looking into a replacement for the one in my bedroom even though it’s only 2 years old and even though I paid way too much for it in the middle of a heat wave.

I’ve delved into Consumer Reports’ reviews of window units, which aren’t dated by the way, so I have no idea if we’re talking about a review of a model year that was manufactured here or somewhere else. Not that it especially matters where something was manufactured, but ac units, particularly window units, have gotten more cheaply made and with shoddier workmanship over the past decade.

I’ve looked at customer reviews on a dozen rating sites and vendor sites calculating number of stars on top of a rating base balanced against the age of the reviews (4.5 stars out of 5 on a base of 20 reviews isn’t worth much if the most recent review is two years old). I’ve considered my pocket book and my comfort, and I have, in theory, found the perfect air conditioner.

The Friedrich Kuhl line is not only pretty but it’s highly ranked for energy efficiency, capacity, and, most importantly, quietness. Unfortunately, the Kuhl line is not cheap, as in $958 from the nearest authorized dealer which I found out when I called them this afternoon. And while I don’t normally balk at paying for quality merchandise, especially quality merchandise that helps me get a good night’s sleep, what I do balk at is vendor policies that seem like a blatant rip-off.

If I’m paying $958 for an air conditioner which you don’t have a floor model of that I can test in your store, don’t you think a 20% restocking fee is a bit unreasonable? And more to the point, does it really cost you more money to restock a $958 air conditioner than it does to restock a $375 dishwasher?

So, the next best thing: a trip to Home Depot this weekend to look at and, hopefully, buy a $350 LG window unit which, if it sounds like a jet engine taking off when I get it installed and turn it on, I can return for no fee with no questions asked.

On June 22, 2009 I was in Rome Italy. I had a good day. I woke up early, wandered down to the garden behind the hotel, and wrote some morning pages while I had a cup of tea.  Then there was breakfast and a wander over to the Vittorio Emanuele monument. Then there was some lunch at a fabulous restaurant, you know the kind hidden up an alley, which had been recommened to me by a friend.  In the afternoon, a little wander around and stumbling on a random, 1000+ year-old ruin just right in the middle of the sidewalk.

On June 22, 2009 in Washington, DC nine people died in the worst crash in Metro rail’s history not five minutes outside “my” Metro stop.

Some things have changed in the past year, most notably that Metro has gone to full manual control on the trains which means that instead of a smooth ride with predictable motion I’m often forced to wonder “Does the person driving this train drive his car like that too?” and “Did we just run over something or is one of the wheels on this car square?”

One of the things that I’ve noticed change in the past year is boarding patterns. Right after I got home from my vacation I noticed something odd in the morning commute: virtually no one was getting on the first or the last car of the train. During the evening commute, mostly those two cars were filled with tourists, and trust me they are easy to spot. Given the way the two trains involved in the June 2009 crash smashed together, and given where the fatalities were, this boarding pattern did not surprise. But gradually over the last year it has subsided out of necessity; even the most fearful commuter would rather have a seat than sway in the aisle every single day in both directions on the off chance a train might crash. Take a careful look at photo number 41 in this gallery and then read the caption to get a better picture of just how overloaded Metro really is.

So I found myself on the 22nd of June 2010 staring out the back door of the last car on the train as we made our way along the tracks to “my” Metro station wondering what I would do if I saw another train come up behind us looking like it wasn’t going to stop.  And all I could think about was how to balance being prepared to exit life at a moment’s notice with the reality of having to live life on a daily basis.

Maybe it’s because I’m sitting smack in the middle of my life and I realize that every day, every single minute even, is a gift that shouldn’t be taken for granted. Maybe it’s because I am a student of human nature and I realize that it isn’t in us inherently to look around, pay attention, and understand that you can’t rely on your future self to do what your current self is to lazy, preoccupied, or just unwilling to do no matter how much you say whatever it is you aren’t doing is something you value. Or maybe it’s just that my priorities are shifting again and so I think about these things, about what’s important and what’s not.

The only thing I know for sure is that the bulk of us are totally unprepared for the one absolute certainty about life.

I don’t care what the chart says about sunrise time; we had enough light at 05:36 to read comfortably outside…and given the fact that these days I need a lot of light to read comfortably, that’s saying something.

Chart courtesy Weatherunderground.com

Happy Midsummer, folks!

Not bad for a couple of  bushs I paid $11.99 for at K-mart (yes, long ago enough that they still had the dash in their logo).

Of the people I have met in my life I have never met two who needed a dog less than my next door neighbors. Three years ago they “adopted” a Cocker Spaniel puppy. I say “adopted” because what happened is that the man’s adult daughter got this puppy, couldn’t train it, and foisted it off onto her step-mother, who is known for “rescuing” dogs. The quotation marks may seem twee but based on how these people treat this dog, they’re required.

Cocker spaniels aren’t exactly known for their even temperaments. Like a lot of small breed dogs, they’re nervous and yappy, and they’re particularly nervous and yappy when they aren’t properly socialized.

My neighbors both spend a horrible amount of time out of the house. They both travel for work which is fine. The problem is when she travels for work, which she does for 5-7 days at a time every six weeks.

He can’t stand to have the dog in the house. So when his wife goes out of town he leaves the dog outside for days at a time – yes, she does have shade and adequate water; at least he does that right – letting her in only briefly to feed her and never bothering to clean up the poo from the yard which is especially pleasant during Washington’s typical summer weather of 90+degF and 90% humidity.

And this dog barks, and barks, and barks, and barks. She barks at cars. She barks at people walking through the alley next to their house. She barks at people across the alley who are using their backyard. She barks when the wind blows or when a squirrel runs across our yard.

It’s really not her fault she barks. For one thing, it’s all she can say: she’s a dog. It’s also not her fault that her people don’t understand that dogs are a pack animal and without another dog around they are her pack. None of that alleviates the annoyance of having a barking dog as a constant companion for a week.

I’ve talked to the woman in the couple about him leaving the dog out. I’ve even gone next door when he’s been home and the dog has been barking for an hour or more at a time. It gets better for a while but there’s no real change in either their behavior or in the dog’s. She still barks constantly and my deck and back yard rapidly become unusable because of the flies attracted to the poo. There isn’t really much more I can do. Except, today delivered to me an opportunity for minor revenge.

The letter carriers at our local post office are notoriously inept. It was so bad last year that my block regularly met in the middle of the street to exchange misdelivered mail and we were routinely getting other people’s outgoing mail with our incoming letters. In today’s mail I got both of my neighbor’s Blockbuster Video rentals.

I’m so tempted to open them to see if they’re anything I want to watch. Even if they aren’t something I want to watch, I’m tempted to open them and use the prepaid envelopes to send them back just for the sheer inconvenience factor.

I still haven’t figured out what I’m going to do but hey, whatever it is it won’t be worse than a dog that barks for four hours straight on a nice Saturday night when I have all my windows open. It can’t be any worse than the dog barking right now as I write this.