A/C

 

   In a museum I once saw a tall rectangular slab of polished granite like the one in the movie 2001 A Space Odyssey. The slab in the movie represented mankind's dawning consciousness. The one in the museum was from Egypt. Servants would roll the slab into the valley near the river after sunset where it would cool off during the night. At dawn the servants rolled it back into the palace to cool the pharaoh during the heat of the day.

   We don't have any servants. We do have electricity, which is even better. We can use electricity to cool our palaces if we want. Teresa and I have done without electric cooling forever, but with climate change, the number of 90 plus degree days has increased. When we got a new furnace recently we had the option to add a heat pump which would reduce the amount of of heating fuel we burned and would also provide air conditioning. But it would have tripled the cost of the furnace. This empowered us to buy our first window air conditioner.

   We are minimalists so we bought the smallest window unit available. It was called a "small room unit" which we figured would be plenty for our small house. We bought the unit on the first ninety degree day of the year. We decided to install it immediately. It was late in the afternoon and we had been busy all day. I realized right away my instruction reading faculties were at a low ebb. 

   In the past we had placed a/c units in windows at the farm where they had been installed the previous summer. We knew from experience that the things are heavy awkward beasts with delicate "wings" that never fill the gaps between the unit and the window frame. Normally I'd watch several YouTube videos for a project like this. The one video we watched was just as unhelpful as the instruction booklet. The wings were marked L and R. But what is left and right to an air conditioner? That was not made clear. Once you put the curtain in its plastic frame it's very difficult to get back at least on our model. The dimensions on the box said the unit would fit into a narrow window where it would be mostly out of sight. But when we tried to get the unit into the window frame it wouldn't quite fit. The alternative wider window was in the dining room where the unit would be a noisy guest at our meals, so we were motivated to make the narrow window work.

   As we pushed and twisted the unit we realized we had put one of the wings in the wrong way. I thought the frame would snap as Teresa tried to slide it out, but she has a good feel for the tensile strength of a beam of plastic. We got the unit in place but our job was far from done. There was a little bag of screws and steel brackets that should be installed to keep the unit from falling out of the window, but there was no space to use a screwdriver let alone the electric drill the woman in the video used. 

   In our walks around town we had noticed people using steel or wooden legs under their units. We scoured our several sheds for appropriate pieces of wood to support our unit. I am especially bad at never getting rid of anything, which sometimes it turns out in our favor. We had removed a corner computer desk last year and instead of hauling the thing to the dump, we put it on the Roseau Sell & Swap Facebook page where it has languished ever since. The desk had been installed in 2000 by Mark Geroy. He had made fancy legs with fluted sides. I had to cut off a couple of inches but the legs fit perfectly under the unit.

   After replacing the dead batteries included with the remote, our a/c roared to life, in Eco mode. The instruction booklet said the installation would take one hour. We spent two on the job which is about right when we tackle a job together. Shortly after Teresa and I got married we wallpapered a room in our St. Paul apartment. My mother told me later that when she saw we had been able to hang wallpaper together she was confident that our marriage would be successful.

We might be rednecks