The Time Sink

Well, Sunday evening turned into one of the more interesting ones in this household: on a 113F day the AC unit gave up... Oh, yeah, 2200 in the evening, and while we were hosting a friend and her son because their AC was out.

...and with an MS patient in the house, cooling is essential. ...and when the overnight low is predicted at 90F? Yeah, it was a long night. We shut down non-essential heat generators (like computers) and brought the extra fans inside to at least try to bring a comfort level to ourselves and our guests...

We're back up in the getting down department (temperature subdivision)... After a darned warm night with not much sleep, Shelley started the phone call routine around 0700 Monday morning (I'm not human until at least... well ... later, anyway). She hit gold several calls into the list and found a place that could schedule a service tech out within a few hours. I'm not sure how to explain how extraordinary that is here in the land of triple digits (and into the teens) for most of the month. Regardless, she scored better than she knew: the tech showed up even earlier than promised.

The short version? The compressor fan motor likely caused the system to fail. I was listening while I tried a restart after letting the system cool down Sunday night and I was pretty sure we were looking at a locked rotor situation. ...but after an all night cool-down, the compressor was able to start, but the fan didn't want to. ...and the capacitor was good. Hmmm... Not so short. Right: parts and parts and time and time (I make a decent apprentice when it's just as hot inside as outside). Four hours later we were able to say things were working again. ...and right into the heat of the day as a test. Man...

Not to put to much of a spin on how hot it is here, but this is a shot taken at 1700 yesterday of a heat sensor reading the 'club' on my steering wheel...

The black in the background is the back side of the silver reflector sun screen propped on my dashboard to block the sunlight through the windshield.

I have to say I'm pretty much done (and done in) with the heat here. ...but they say we're supposed to cool off ten or twelve degrees in the next day or so. Hmmm... Hitting 100F is now a good thing?

The photo up on the blog today is of a memory chip for a laptop... Yep, there's a story to tell...

Ah, much better...

That's the last little bit of the upgrade to the laptop Daniel conned me into taking in exchange for a hardwired net connection... Yes, there's a story there, but the power outage Saturday night has put that on hold for a bit...

After being up and down much of last night deaing with the power going out (and later with it coming back on) and driving Daniel to camp this afternoon? I need some sleep. I'll work on playing catchup mañana...

Click image for larger version

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is
indistinguishable from magic."
Arthur C. Clarke, "Technology and the Future"

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