Mr. Fixit Strikes Again

I took three days off this week, and it was nice to get away from work for a bit. I expected to get a lot more done around the house, but the twins sort of nipped that in the bud.

Our master bedroom is positioned way off and up in a distant corner where the air conditioner can't quite reach, and it gets ridiculously hot up there, so we dragged our large family to Home Depot and bought a window unit (and some other stuff). "Haha!", I thought, "I will unpack the window unit and install it in a flash! How hard can it be?"

Haha indeed. I unpacked the thing and after a few moments in the bedroom sweat started to appear on my brow. The room was way too hot for anyone to sleep comfortably, which is why I needed to hurry. So after a bit of tinkering and speed-reading the directions, I was ready to move the little thing into place. But wow, the little thing turned out to be really, really heavy.

After moving the ginormous thing into place, and then out again 'cause I "forgot something" (the story of my life), I noticed that there was red stuff all over the side. Naturally my first thought, being hot and tired, was to find which one of my kids had spilled juice and give them a good lecture. I looked down at my hand, and it was red too. All over. And then I realized it was blood. I had inadvertently squeezed my hand onto the metal gills (or whatever you call them) on the back of the air conditioner, and little strips of skin were hanging off of my hand. So I did the only thing I could. With a twinkle in my eye I held up my bleeding hand so my wife and kids could see, and moaned, "Gaagh! I'm bleeding!"

Unfortunately, I didn't get quite the reaction I was hoping for, possibly because my wife was already occupied with the screaming twins. She did tell me I needed a bandaid. So I bandaged myself, whilst explaining to my son in the manliest possible way that "this is the kind of thing that happens when we do work around the house! Blood and gore makes us strong, son!"

It's hard to say exactly what he was thinking, but he's always enthusiastic about getting a good look at my most recent injury, so at least I had a small but captive audience.

I finally got the air conditioner installed, turned it on, and listened to its rapturous hum as it started cooling our room. I was elated. After buying the house at the end of last summer we spent almost two months in sweltering heat each night. This was wonderful! Whoever invented the air conditioner was a genius.

But as for me, I'm not sure the word genius would be entirely accurate. The next night I started hearing a dripping noise. Surely not the air conditioner. But yes, in my haste I had the nasty scoundrel thing tilted the wrong way, so that any overflow would flow like a fountain into our room.

Ggrrrrr.

So yeah, that's what I'll be doing Saturday. Installing the window unit.

Again.

Oh, and the other thing I bought at Home Depot was a chainsaw.