Winter Isn't Coming

When I can't think of a picture to use, I use 

a picture of Audrey Hepburn.

It was a hot evening, a very, VERY hot evening. The heat was the kind of heat that left you with little to do, outside of rocking on your front porch, sipping lemonade, and wondering aloud when General Beauregard would arrive from Richmond. Naturally, being a night when the heat had reached the heights of Atlanta before the war, it would make it a remarkably perfect evening for my air conditioning to cut out completely.

At first, I hadn't noticed the increasing heat inside my home. I had spent most of that day in my basement lair, watching movies and playing records. My first indication that something was amiss with the air is when my cat ambled down the stairs, and looked at me with a look that said “Let's try that telepathic communication we've been working on, shall we?” I sat my iPad down, and looked intensely into my cat's eyes.

“Human, the temperature in the room where the kibble is stored appears to be warmer than it was before when I was making my rounds. You might wish to investigate this. Meow.” That is what I got back from him, while he looked at me, a slight purr, and tale wagging. “You're right, cat. It does feel warmer in this house.” I transmitted back to him. Then he bit me on the leg as I was standing up, and I swore like a sailor at him.

I went upstairs to look at the thermostat, it was set at 72, but was currently reading the house temperature as 77. I, having no clue what could be the problem, went around and turned on every fan I own. After doing that, I called my friend Dave, who knew a thing or two about a thing or two when it came to air conditioning. Dave told me the quickest he could come over would be sometime the next day, in late afternoon. I began to ponder how I would manage to keep myself comfortable and not dead from dehydration for a 24 hour period.

My first step of order was to make sure that the cat had plenty of water in his bowl, he did, and he was pleased. Then I began to think about all the “what ifs” that could occur during the 24 hour internal heat wave. “What if my fridge breaks down and I can't have ice? What if heat miser shows up thinking it's Christmas in July!? What if Rick Astley sends out a tweet publicly announcing that he has given us all up?”

As the heat began to amp up my paranoia, I realized that all the ice in the house was melting. It wasn't, but my mind became convinced that it was. I drove to the nearest Sonic, and bought as many bags of ice that I could fit into my car. As I unloaded fifteen bags of ice into my house, I soon realized they wouldn't all fit into my freezer. Three bags did, four went into coolers, four into a giant metal washtub, and four went into the downstairs bathtub. I would sometimes just dive into the ice, and let it freeze me all over, that is until the heat made it melty.

As the sun began to set, and the heat had reached its peak, I found myself doing things that I couldn't even explain. At one point I started walking around in an undershirt reciting dialogue from “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.” When I walked into the kitchen and yelled “Maggie the Cat is alive!” I swear I saw what looked like my cat trying to dial 911 on the telephone. I'm not entirely sure if I went to sleep or passed out, all I know is I woke up on the floor of my living room the next day.

Dave came by the house around four, it didn't take him long to find the problem, something had short-circuited, and luckily he had a replacement in his truck. As Dave started to repair the A/C unit, I began to clean up around the house, and trying to figure out how to deal with all the ice I had bought the day before—at least the ice that hadn't melted yet. All the ice in the metal tub had completely melted, and I thought I would take it out downstairs and dump it in the back yard.

As I began carrying the large and difficult to maneuver steel tub down the stairs, my vision was somewhat limited. So it was that I did not see Dave as he started to come up the stairs, and he, looking at the part he just replaced, did not notice a man with a large tub of water coming in his direction. What transpired was my own homemade recreation of Splash Mountain. On the one hand, after a 24 hour cycle of heat, it felt good to have a sudden splash of water. On the other hand, Dave then asked me if I would like to use his shop-vac.