“Did I leave the door open?”,  I asked the dog.   He’d have been the reason that I would have left the door open, so I figured he owed me some indication of an answer. 

 He just wagged his tail, and remained stretched out diagonally, filling the office floor.

I could hear the air conditioner running, but it was getting hot in here, even for five in the afternoon.  Leaving the door open, letting all the cold air escape and the desert heat enter, was the only explanation I could think of for the rising temperature.

I got up to check, squeezing around the dog, making sure I didn’t step on the long hairs of his tail each time he flopped it on the floor. 

The door wasn’t open.

There are a number of cute ways Tucsonans use to describe the desert heat… ‘it’s a dry heat’, ‘anything below 70 degrees is sweater weather’, ‘when it hits 100 the ice on the Santa Cruz River finally melts’… but, straight up, when  it is monsoon season, which it is right now, it’s HOT and HUMID.  

It had been hitting 104 for daytime highs for weeks now, but that’s do-able if you stay inside during the hottest part of the day. And blazing temperatures all day hold the promise of big, rainy thunderstorms in the evening, which I like.

I turned around and bumped into the dog, who had gotten up to follow me, and went into the hallway to look at the thermostat. It read 84 degrees. I had set it to hold on 79.

I pushed the spot on the touchpad that changed he ‘hold’ temperature, and made it read 79 degrees.  It complied, but only for a moment, then it flashed back to 84.

I repeated the process, and got the same results.  I tried it one more time, just in case.

There’s a saying about doing the same thing over and over, and expecting different results, but I’d probably go insane trying to remember it….

I turned the air conditioner off.  I waited twenty minutes.  I turned it back on.  I repeated my previous process, with the same danged results.

The air conditioner would run, but it was definitely not making “cold”, and kept insisting that the temperature I wanted was 84.

I called my husband at work.

“Honey, I hate to tell you this, but I think the air conditioner is broken.”

If I had been the least little bit clever, I might have given him the news by saying, “Hey, honey, your wife is really HOT,” but then I would have had to disappoint him with the real news anyway.

When he got home, he checked fuses and compressors and did all the manly electronic things I wouldn’t dare.  He  didn’t  keep pressing the touchpad thermostat as I had done.

He called and arranged for a repairman.

My next step would have been to call the repairman, too, just so you know.

We spent the evening moving around as little as possible, glad that we at least had fans, and the TV to watch.

I slept last night with a wet cloth, moving it from arms to legs to forehead, letting the breeze from the fan evaporate the water, keeping me just cool enough to sleep. I used to do that when I was a little girl, before central air conditioning was the norm, when sleeping porches were the luxury.

Around midnight, the curtains began to billow, and the blinds clunked against the window frame. The wet cloth was almost dry, but it got momentarily cold in the wind, and then I heard the first good rain of the monsoon rushing against the skylight.

The repairman will be here in about an hour, he said.  It really is starting to get quite hot in the house. The thermostat in the hallway reads 92. The dog has moved from behind me in the office to lying diagonally across hallway on the cool tile. The door is open, and the desert heat is coming in.

Leslie