Rant #3,187: This Just Doesn't Seem To Be My Day

A short column today … too much going on today to go into much detail, but what is going on is only peripherally related to my mother, so if there is a silver lining in this rain cloud, that is it.

With everything happening here—which I am not going to go into specifics about right now—one thing that kept my wife and I up last night was our window air conditioner, which after more than 35 years of service—yes, 35 years!—appears to have finally died on us.

It has struggled the last year or two, so we knew the time would eventually come where we needed a new unit.

The last two years or so, it has cooled down our bedroom as best as it could, but it really never made the room cold, it simply removed the heat from the room. It made it comfortable enough to be in and sleep in, but it did not continue to have the capacity make the room cold, just habitable.

That was preceded by a bird—or perhaps another animal, like a squirrel—somehow either crashing into it or getting caught in it a few years ago. I was in the room when it happened, and to hear the poor animal trying to extricate itself from the machinations of the unit was downright disheartening, to say the least, but it did not help the air conditioner either.

Then last night, at about 2 a.m. in the morning my wife woke up and put on the light, and as I opened up one eye and then the next one, she told me that something was dripping in the room, or at least she heard the sound of something dripping.

Honestly, I did not hear anything, as I was pretty much still in my sleep mode, but when I finally cleared my head, I also started to hear the “ker-plunk” of dripping, and lo and behold, something was dripping—

And it was coming from the air conditioner inside our room.

I shut the unit off, took off the cover, and lo and behold, a thick sheet of ice had coalesced right inside the unit, and rather than the water going outside the unit as it is supposed to, it was doing the reverse, dripping water from the melting ice inside, all over an old backpack that just happened to be resting under it.

I got a towel, put it underneath the unit to catch any more drips, opened the window, and we both tried to go back to sleep, only partially successful in that regard.

I woke up two hours later with one of the worst allergy attacks I have had in recent memory—blowing my nose incessantly for at least 10 minutes with such ferocity that I had to go into the bathroom to do so, lest I wake up my wife with all the noise—and then I finally was able to go back to sleep when my body got back to some sense of normalcy.

I woke up at 6 a.m., and I immediately checked the towel--and it was as dry as when I took it out of the linen closet to put it there, meaning that no other water had come out of the unit.

I will check the air conditioner today to see if that was nothing more than an aberration, but I have a sneaking suspicion that we are going to need a new unit, and the faster it is installed the better.

I have terrible allergies … my allergies have been on high this entire wretchedly hot summer, and I think the uptick in the use of the air conditioner during this ultra-hot summer did major, irreparable damage to it.

Look, I can’t complain about the use we got out of this unit, I first bought it during my first marriage when we lived in a neighboring town, and since it was such a good unit at the time, I took it with me when my parents built up their house to accommodate my family—and it has worked throughout my second marriage.

At more than 35 years—and much like my old car which gave me nine years and nearly 100,000 miles—how can I complain about an air conditioner that gave my family that many years of service?

I can’t, so I won’t.

In fact, I hope we can still use this air condoner after all.

And it is a Sanyo, of all brands … does that brand even exist anymore?

To top everything off, the cherry on the cake was this morning, my belt literally tore itself into tatters, so I am without a belt.

My new electric razor wasn’t cutting my whiskers today, either, taking me twice as long to shave as it should have.

Maybe that gizmo is next on the hit parade.

And heck, this is not as short a Rant as I thought it would be.

All I can say and ask is “What’s next?”--

And I hope that I don’t get a reply.