* * *
I bet my weekend was WAY more fun than yours. Yes way, it was TOO. For instance, did you lose your air conditioning capabilities for several hours?
No, having your power knocked out by the hurricane doesn’t count.
Friday evening while I was waiting for the pizza to arrive, I turned to Fred, who was sitting in front of his computer.
“Are you sure you turned the air up?” I asked. It’s his job on Friday afternoons, as he’s going upstairs to change into his shlubby hanging-around-the-house clothes, to turn the air up. Fridays are the days we eat whatever junk food strikes our fancy, and Friday evenings our bodies tend to run on overdrive to process all the food we’ve tossed down our throats, so we’re always hotter than usual on Fridays.
“Yeah, I did,” Fred said. “But I’ll check again.” A moment later, I heard a bemused “Huh” from the stairs.
“What?” I called.
“It’s set on 71, but the temperature is almost 80, and the air conditioning isn’t running.”
To make a long story short (too late!), due to the fact that we are lax in cleaning out the air uptake filter thingy, the air conditioning unit outside had frozen through, and we needed to turn it off for a few hours so it could thaw.
Or something like that.
By 7:30 I was on the floor with the cats, “Meh”ing bitchily and swearing that I was dyyyyyyying from heat stroke. By bedtime, I was shaking my fist at the ceiling and swearing that I would never be hot again.
At least I had the ceiling fan to make some semblance of cooling me off. Plus there’s the fact that I sleep butt-ass nekkid –
(I’ll just let you sit with the horror of that image for a moment before proceeding)
and Miz Poo didn’t even try to climb up on me and share her body heat, so I was able to fall asleep fairly quickly. Fred got up at 2:30 to exercise (yeah, I don’t know what’s up with that. He’s freakish.) and turned the air on, and an hour later I was happily bundled up under the covers with only my nose showing. And the air conditioning has worked just fine ever since.
Thank gawd. ‘Cause like I don’t LIKE to sweat and shit, Muffy!
Seriously. I don’t know how you no-air-conditioning-having motherfuckers do it. Hats off to YOU.
* * *
Then Saturday, we got up early (well, early for me. I like to sleep ’til at least 8 on Saturdays and I was up at SEVEN! ::gasp!::) and went to check out the thousands and thousands of motorcycles driving the Trail of Tears. Fred and the spud checked it out last year, but this was the first time I’d seen it myself, and words cannot express how awe-inspiring it was to see that unending stream of motorcycles coming down the road. We stood there for a good half hour or more and I don’t know if we even saw half of them.
Fred’s got pictures
here.
At one point, the spud suggested that Fred and I should buy a bike so we could ride the Trail of Tears next year. We giggled pretty hard at that.
* * *
When we got home from that, Fred went out to mow the lawn, and I sat down to back up all the important things on my computer, because it was time YET AGAIN to reformat my hard drive. This is, I believe, the third time in the past year this has needed to be done. While I was backing up my email, I realized that I smelled something. It smelled good… it smelled like marshmallows… Oh shit!
I realized I’d put sugar water for the hummingbirds on to boil FORTY-FIVE MINUTES PREVIOUSLY, and it had all boiled away. Hoping to save the very expensive pot, I ran water into it, and burned sugar splattered everywhere. I was able to save the pot (part of a Christmas gift from Fred’s parents three years ago), thank god. The house still smells faintly of burned sugar, and it’s not an unpleasant smell by any means. Covers up the dirty cat litter smell that usually permeates the air.
(Kidding on that one. You can’t smell the litter box unless you’re in the room with it)
* * *
So the rest of the day was spent reading on the couch while Fred did the reformat thing. And then I spent an hour or so fighting with Eudora, trying to reinstall my “in box” files, my “Bullshit!” files, and the like. At one point I said to Fred “FUCK THIS. I’m free. All my old email is gone, and the Bullshit! people are shit out of luck. I’m done messing with it.”
Fred said “You still have
Bullshit! tapes going around?”
Do I ever. I need to start harassing the people who have the tapes or who were last to have had the tapes one of these days.
But Fred, being the genius, figured it out and saved all my email. Thank gawd. And my computer hasn’t locked up even once since the reformat (constant locking up was what made us decide to reformat).
* * *
Sunday, after sleeping until 9 (I’m a slacker) I got up and made Fred put the hair coloring in my hair. It came out darker than I wanted – I would have said it was more a dark brown than a medium golden brown – but Fred did a kick-ass job of covering all the grays, and I know that the color will fade in the next few weeks, so I’m not going to complain.
And then last night we watched the Emmys, mostly because nothing else was on, and Fred had heard that there was going to be a tribute to John Ritter. Naturally it didn’t come on before 9, so we went to bed and taped the rest.
Is it just me, or is Gary Shandling not funny at ALL?
* * *
The sunset from our back yard Saturday night.
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