September 2020 archive

Imagine being thankful for the bathroom fan.

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

Well, I did manage to find our gaming cards…

Apparently the old controller that I had that I could hook up to the computer, use, and play games with has grown legs and walked away… because for the life of me, I can not find it anywhere around this house that I know I would have put it. I went through the infamous “junk drawer” that I have in my room, although my intentions are to organize it a bit better, found some gaming walkthrough books that I am glad that I have (Final Fantasy X and Final Fantasy X-2 bundled together, Final Fantasy XIII-2, and Final Fantasy XIII: Lightning Returns), and I finally found the kids’ Magic the Gathering and YuGiOh decks that I made them. To be honest, I’m perplexed that I even made them some of these decks. Bub actually has a Blue Eyes, White Dragon deck… or whatever you actually call that one since it’s been years since I’ve sat down and played that game with anyone, having formally “retired” from it myself as an actual player for a number of reasons.

I think it says a lot about YuGiOh that I looked at the cards for awhile and the rules didn’t immediately come to me, but given the reasons that I retired (or “retired”, if you want to continue to put quotation marks around it) from it, that isn’t an entirely bad thing. If the kids want to get into it, or even want to look through the cards — Bub thought it was Christmas when I found them — they are more than welcome to, but I don’t have any other reason to play the game myself any more and I am just fine with that. I’m not going to denigrate it as a child’s game since I have several adult friends who continue to play it, who are good at it, but I have my reasons for no longer actively playing it myself that I’ve already written about. And that’s okay.

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