July 8, 2010
“What dreadful hot weather we have! It keeps me in a continual state of inelegance." -- Jane Austen
Did you know that pasta can lose its shape when your air conditioning quits?
Did you know that chocolate actually turns gray in high humidity if you don't put it in the refrigerator?
I didn't know that either, but I found out last weekend when our air conditioning unit decided to "meet its maker" after 22 years of near perfect service.
The resulting hot and humid ordeal lasted three plus days.
It is undoubtedly written somewhere that air conditioning breakdowns are required to occur over a holiday weekend.
You guessed it--our A/C breakdown happened over the Fourth of July. We were at the Lake of the Ozarks where typically one cannot find a repairman if the fish are biting or if there is a cloud in the sky. In this case, the repairmen did his best to get there, but we were simply too far down the list of "you have to come now" service requests. He didn't make it.
Did you know that when you live three days in record heat and humidity without A/C, your bread molds over night and everything in your house attracts dust by the bucket load?
The dust was about the only thing that hung around our house. Some guests started bailing out on the second day, and I don't blame them at all,
Our immediate family stayed, however, and so did a cousin from Nashville and a nephew from Kansas. I really don't know why. I was ready to leave on the second day myself.
Instead, they accepted their fate and dug in for the duration.
My solution--I jumped in the lake and stayed there until forced to come inside for food.
I did not want to cook and left that up to my cousin from the South who did. Incidentally, the sweltering temperatures in the kitchen never deterred him for a second.
When the rest of us woke on the morning after the third stifling night, we found our Nashville cousin in the kitchen frying sausage to add to his homemade gravy and baking biscuits in, yes, the oven!
"Hey, good morning," he said, "This heat isn't so bad. The pioneers never had air conditioning, so I guess we don't need it either."
"Hey," I replied, "You know what Benjamin Franklin said, don't you? After three days, fish and visitors stink."
I guess you could say I was a lot like Jane Austin about then and in a continual state of inelegance and bad humour.
My cousin, who always seems to be in a disgustingly good mood, laughed as he started frying up some bacon to accompany the biscuits and gravy. You gotta love it.
I went outside where there was a breeze and ate a popsicle.
