Copyright © 2022 by Ralph Robert Moore.

Return to lately 2022.

Our home has two HVAC systems. One for the ground floor, one for the second floor. Each is independent of the other.

Which comes in handy when one fails, like our second-floor air-conditioning system did last month.

Like almost everyone else, we have a routine.

I wake up, go upstairs to check my emails, Facebook, some news sites to see what's happened since we fell asleep last night, watch some YouTube videos, mostly people reacting to songs from the 50's-90's they've never heard before.

Walk back downstairs, dogged by the cats. Feed them, take out from the kitchen or garage freezer anything that needs to be defrosted for breakfast, make coffee, do some cleaning.

Once Mary wakes up, we have our 'morning hug', very important, then pour ourselves some coffee, get back in bed, and watch the local news, then the national news. Pour another cup, watch a show we recorded on our DVR, Big Brother, So You Think You Can Dance, Below Deck, Zombie House Flipping, a few others, or watch a true crime documentary on Netflix or Hulu, an episode of Judge Judy or Family Feud, then around ten or so go out to the kitchen to make breakfast.

Weekdays it could be eggs over easy, ham steak, English muffins with blueberry jam; eggs over easy, pork sausage patties, hash browns; eggs over easy, bacon, waffles with maple syrup; omelets with chunks of ham, sautéed slices of fresh mushrooms and various grated Mexican cheeses; or a few other favorites. Fridays we have Mary McMuffins, an English muffin sandwich with a thick slice of ham, fried egg on top of the ham slice, then two slices of American cheese, fried potato patty on the side; Saturday we have lobster rolls, cubed lobster tail meat combined with chopped celery in a mayonnaise binding, served in a hot dog roll; Sundays we have cheeseburgers.

After breakfast we watch a movie. Could be an adult drama, a thriller, horror movie, comedy.

After that, the latest episode of one of eleven series we rewatch on a continuing basis, so that we return to each episode every two years or so, about the same amount of time it takes Mars to revolve around the sun.

Right now, we're rewatching Breaking Bad.

After we rewatch our preferred series, we go upstairs. Me with a whiskey, Mary with a dark German beer, usually Spaten Optimater. Spaten has a deep, complex flavor. We love it, used to uncap two cold bottles each day after working in our garden, drinking them under the shade trees at the rear of our property, but some find its assertive darkness off-putting. (When my dad flew down with his companion Kay to spend a week with us, as it turns out about two years before his death, at the end of our first day together, we gave them a six pack of Spaten to take back to the motel room we had obtained for them. The next morning, picking them up to go to the Sixth Floor Exhibit in Dallas where Oswald supposedly shot John F. Kennedy, my dad came out of the motel room carrying the six pack minus one bottle. Made a face. "Not for me").

So Mary and I headed up our staircase July 13, and it was incredibly hot in the upstairs rooms, the vents in the white ceilings of our upstairs rooms blowing out, instead of cold air, hot air. 'Incredibly hot air' like, 'dangerously hot air'.

Went back down the stairs.

I called a local HVAC repair company.

A representative came out the next morning. After about an hour up in our attic, out in our backyard to check our compressor, he told us our system, which was outmoded, had failed. It had to be replaced. I believed him.

Ten thousand dollars.

The thing is, Texas is having its worst heat wave in 123 years of recorded temperatures.

In Texas, where 95 degrees is considered 'warm', that means something.

Even hotter temperatures were likely to occur in the month ahead.

The representative arranged for a crew to come out the next day to pull out everything from our attic and walls, put in new equipment. It was going to be an all-day job.

I could be depressed about it, but I wasn't. It's not like Mary has to go back to a hospital and skilled nursing facility for two months, or I have to be in a hospital for several days, separated from my love, waiting to get surgery for a broken hip.

Mary and I would be together, the workers will be gone after six-eight hours, and in the long run, ten thousand dollars is only ten thousand dollars.

So that Friday morning we got a call around 8:30 a.m. saying the HVAC technicians were on their way.

Before they arrived, I needed to go out into our backyard, walk around the red brick rear exterior of our home, traveling east, then north, to the wooden gate on the side of our property separating the backyard from the front yard, to unlock the gate.

In years gone by, that would have been easy. Mary and I had turned our backyard into a small park, grass pathways winding around large beds of trees, bushes, flowers.

But after Mary's stroke, and me breaking my right hip, the backyard had reverted to its wild state. The paths were completely overgrown. Disappeared. Large tree limbs had fallen on the ground here and there, blocking access. We used to see rabbits and road runners back there, but now it was mostly big racoons clawing up tree trunks; long snakes slithering through the brush.

As I pushed my forearms through the thickets, avoiding the sprawls of poison ivy, having to detour more than once, my one consolation was that I had hot coffee and a pack of cigarettes waiting for me if I managed to make it back to our home's rear door after unlocking the gate.

Which I did manage to do.

Mary and I were already dressed in anticipation of the call (we figured it might frighten the HVAC techs if I opened the front door in my pajamas); and I had already lured our two cats, Frick and Frack, into our garage with two white Styrofoam bowls of canned cat food, laying the bowls down on the floor, tip-toeing away from them as they lustily lowered their heads within the bowls, closing the door behind them to isolate them in the garage, for their own protection (they're strictly house cats, and we didn't want them wandering outside during one of the fifty or so times our front door would open that day, the techs bringing in new equipment, taking out old equipment).

Our downstairs rooms still had air-conditioning, but because the techs would be spending almost all of their time downstairs (access to both our upstairs and downstairs HVAC systems are accessible through a trap door in the ceiling of our downstairs master closet), we decided to spend the time during their visit upstairs in the un-air-conditioned rooms.

That may seem like an odd choice, but the fact is we had a long thunderstorm the day before, which unexpectedly broke the back of the heat wave, lowering the temperature by about twenty degrees, and they were going to start work at nine in the morning, before the sun was too high in the sky, so our upstairs rooms should be bearable.

Which they were. For quite a while. But then ten o'clock rolled slowly to eleven o'clock, to noon, and our upstairs rooms were getting uncomfortable. I found three desk fans and placed them on the carpet around Mary's chair, their cold air blowing up at Mary. To distract ourselves, we watched some videos on YouTube, mostly funny cat and fail army videos.

But at some point, even a video of a cat on a kitchen table getting ready to jump from the table to the kitchen counter, and failing miserably (but funnily), just wasn't enough to distract us from the fact we were getting uncomfortably hot. This was especially hard for Mary, who since her stroke has understandably had problems with stress. So we decided to go downstairs and spend the rest of the wait time at our breakfast nook table.

As I was getting refills of our ice water I ran into one of the two techs working on our system. "Would you like some ice water for the two of you?" Because it was so hot outside, and in our attic. He seemed genuinely surprised. "Almost no one offers us ice water." Bobbed his head. "We're almost finished."

After I set Mary's glass of ice water down in front of her on our breakfast nook table, I showed her two thumbs up. "He said they're almost finished!"

About an hour and a half after that, I ran into him again. He gave me an enthusiastic nod. "We're finishing up, now!"

An hour later: "Not much longer!"

Every once in a while I'd go upstairs, to the stifling rooms, and head towards the back room where Mary's dad, Joe, used to stay during his annual holiday visits, until he too passed away; looking out the window, down at the large truck parked at our curb.

First look, there was a lot of our old HVAC equipment spread across the lawn.

Next look, the old equipment was gone from the grass, replaced with shiny new equipment.

Next look, basically just lawn.

All right. We're making progress.

The lead tech again swung open our front door, raised his voice from the front foyer. "Mr. Moore, would it be at all possible to use your bathroom?"

Sitting at our breakfast table at the rear of our first floor, I turned around in my seat. "Absolutely! It's at the bottom of the stairs."

"Thank you, Sir!"

We heard the bathroom door close.

After ten minutes, we heard him coughing loudly in the bathroom.

Mary and I raised our eyebrows at each other.

Another ten minutes passed, then even more loud coughing.

A few minutes after that, heard the bathroom door swing open, the tech exiting the bathroom, opening the front door, going back outside.

The next time I went upstairs to check out the progress, cold air was blowing down from the upstairs ceiling vents. The thermostat read 89 degrees, but I knew that would drop.

I came back downstairs, walked back to the breakfast nook table, told Mary the good news.

And then nothing happened for about half an hour.

Both techs were outside. Hadn't come back inside the house. It seemed like they had finished, so I'm wondering why they aren't coming back inside to get paid.

I went back upstairs to look through the back room's window again, but as soon as I was mid-way up the stairs, I was hit with a blast of hot air from the ceiling vent.

The upstairs vents that had been blowing cold air, were once again blowing hot air.

Something had gone wrong with the repair. We were back to square one.

Now I'm thinking the reason they aren't coming back inside is because they're reluctant to tell me their effort failed. Or, they're on the phone with their home base, arranging to have more technicians come out. At this point, they've been here eight and a half hours, and Mary and I just want to be done with it, alone together again in our home.

If they weren't going to come inside to talk to me, I figured the best thing to do was for me to go outside, walk up to their truck, and find out what was wrong.

Which, as you can imagine, I didn't relish doing. But it needed to be done.

So I explained to Mary what I was going to do, then opened the front door, walked down our driveway to their truck, and looked inside.

I was really discouraged at this point. It seemed like after all these long hours of waiting, the problem still wasn't resolved. But I knew the worst thing I could do in this situation is lose my temper. Which is almost never helpful, or conducive to resolving an issue.

So I caught the second tech's attention within the truck, putting a smile on my face. "How's it going?"

"Great!"

"I went upstairs a while ago and cold air was blowing down, but then I went upstairs just now, and it's hot air coming out of the vents again."

"Yeah, we have to shut everything down again in order to do the completion, but it should be all right now." He got out of the truck, walked with me through our side gate into the backyard, where the lead tech, who had spent a mysterious twenty minutes in our bathroom, was bent over the new compressor, making some adjustments.

"Hi. I went upstairs a while ago and cold air was blowing down, but then I went upstairs just now, and it's hot air coming out of the vents again."

The lead tech kept making adjustments. "We turn it on to make sure everything's hooked up, but then we have to shut it back down to make the final steps. It's back up now."

"Can we go upstairs just to confirm the system's working now?"

He straightened up from his final adjustments, sweat on his face. "Yeah! Absolutely!"

So he and I went back through the front door, up the carpeted steps to the second floor.

The vents were, indeed, blowing down cold air.

"All right!"

He grinned.

They finally left, and our upstairs rooms started cooling. 90 degrees. An hour later, 89 degrees.

All was good again. Our problem was solved. For $10,000. No need to worry anymore.

The next morning, while Mary was still asleep, after I checked my emails, fed the cats, brought in from the garage freezer anything that needed to be defrosted for our breakfast, I did a load of laundry.

As I dumped different towels down into the washing machine, I heard a tiny, steady thump in the white wall behind the washer.

A thump that had never been there before, but was now, after our new HVAC system was installed, including a new compressor unit placed outside directly behind where the steady thump was emanating.

Which of course is depressing. Is the $10,000 job we paid for already failing?

I listened this morning, and the tapping was gone.

All right!

But then I listened again later on, and the tapping was back.

Like a toothache that goes away, okay, I don't have to go to the dentist after all, but then the toothache comes back.

I haven't mentioned this to Mary, because I don't want her to worry.

Not a noise I wanted to hear.

Innocent coincidence?

Or the heartbeat of a new disappointment?

I know what I need to do is call the HVAC company, have them come out again, but to be honest, I just don't want to do that right now. At some point, I'll go out in the back yard and inspect the compressor myself, to see if I can locate the source of the noise.

It never ends.

(But you already knew that.)