So last month, our air conditioner actually began to go out, presumably from low Freon… that happens.

The only bad thing about that, even though we have plenty of fans in the house capable of circulating air, was that I was tapering down on a medication that impairs one’s ability to sweat (200mg Trokendi), meaning that I could more easily have gotten heat exhaustion or actual heatstroke from this if I did not pay careful attention to how warm I was getting. Needless to say, when I wasn’t spending time directly underneath a circulating fan in this house, I was spending time sitting underneath the bathroom fan because it was the most efficient at circulating cool air, and I could close the bathroom door, turn it on, sit underneath it and cool the entire room fairly rapidly, staying in there until I had completely cooled myself off if the temperature in the house had gotten a bit too warm for me. Further compounding matters was the fact that at the time, I did actually have to take prednisone out of necessity due to my spirometry… so much for “only taking prednisone if absolutely necessary during this pandemic”, eh? And prednisone is known for warming you up a bit, which doesn’t help matters out there either. I have spent plenty of summers intermittently on it thanking the god that I don’t even believe in — figuratively, of course, as I don’t actually believe in the existence of anything supernatural, so this is all me simply being thankful here — that the air conditioner actually worked, and so here I was without it working, having to actually sit underneath the bathroom fan.

This happened on a Friday, and the soonest we could get someone out to look at it was on a Monday, even though we called them as soon as we could tell that something was definitely starting to go amiss with the air conditioner (aside from cleaning it like we were instructed and changing the air filters). It wasn’t something that we could fix at home. And luckily the kids’ bedroom fan is one of the best fans in the house.

Summer checklist: have air conditioner actually start to go out living in one of the hottest states there is