No sleep til Brooklyn...or until the AC gets fixed

Next time someone tells me that global warming is just a myth, I am going to punch them in the face. Seriously. Don't tell me this heat we've been having (since, let's face it, April) is normal. I've been living in DC summers my entire life and we'll usually get this hot maybe around August or so for a few weeks, but never this early, and never this long. But I don't need to tell you, chances are where you live it's the same story.

So what would be the worst thing that could happen right now? That's right: for the air conditioning to break. Which is just what happened in my bedroom. See, my building is pretty old (built in the 1960s), so instead of central air, I have a convector unit in each room which is kind of like a radiator. It does AC in the summer and heat in the winter. Unfortunately, the one in the bedroom started making this really loud clanking noise on Wednesday night that was 1) too loud to sleep through and 2) made me think the motor was going to explode. It also scared the crap out of me when it woke me up around 3:00 in the morning.

Now I have this thing where I cannot sleep when it is really hot. It just doesn't happen; in fact, I like to keep it so cool that I sometimes use an extra blanket, even in the summer. Wasteful? Whatever, it's how I like it. Leave me alone. But there was no way in hell I was going to be able to sleep with no air conditioning these past few days. Which left me one option: the couch. The AC in the living room is working just fine, mostly because it broke back in May. Insert your own "fighting with the wife" joke here, but it seemed pretty sad to have to sleep on my own couch in my own house.

As Whitney pointed out, at least my couch is comfortable. But after 4 nights I found myself really longing for my own bed again. I called in a work order on the AC first thing Thursday morning, but of course they didn't get to it before the end of the day Friday. And the maintenance guys don't do work on the weekends. You can bet your ass I called the office today (Monday) as soon as they opened to ask what gives. And guess what? When I got home they had fixed it! The national nightmare is over, I can get back in my own bed!

And now I realize how incredibly lucky I am that I even have the option of air conditioning and I feel like a whiny little punk for even bitching about it. That's middle class guilt for you.

PS: this might also be the first blog post ever where when I ran spellchecker, I got the message "no misspellings found." Go me!