The Butterfly Who Loved the Air Conditioner

We had a very friendly red-spotted purple (Limenitis arthemis astyanax) show up on this morning. It flew all around the front porch and almost landed on my husband. Then it flitted up into the front window, where it perched on the outside of the air conditioner. It seemed to enjoy the little breeze that the unit was making. It went back and forth several times.

Somehow, it reminded me of our silly tabby-boy Dexter, who had a thing for the dehumidifier. It blew warm, dry air out the front, and he often snuggled up to it. In fact, he loved turning his butt toward it and airing it all out! I do have a picture of him on Blip with the dehumidifier (butt-shot not included, alas - that one made it to Facebook, but not Blipfoto).

You may note that the air conditioner, a Sharp, bears some battle scars. Why, yes, my husband and I have dropped TWO different air conditioners out windows in our time together. The first one was my own Sharp air conditioner (smaller than this), which we dropped out a first-floor window back at the little house I lived in before this, on Kemmerer Road. That was small potatoes, though: FLOOP! Out the window it went, cushioned by a bunch of ivy. It was only a fall of two or three feet. It worked just fine after that, no problemo.

This one, my husband's, larger than my own A/C unit, we dropped out a second-floor window here. We were installing it, and lost purchase. I grabbed (in vain) for the power cord, and got a nasty blue bruise on my arm for my efforts. It sort of landed in the dirt outside the window, its fall cushioned by a lilac bush. In a majorly surprising turn of events, it still works just fine. You could say that both Sharp air conditioners have taken a licking and keep on ticking, to mix appliances and metaphors.

We used to joke that we'd graduate to even larger appliances, tossed out of even higher locations. In fact, I had a huge stainless steel side-by-side refrigerator when I first moved in here. It was left here by the people before us, and I worked out a deal with them about the fridge and the washer and dryer when I bought the place. When the fridge started to go downhill, we threatened to toss it off the roof! But alas, somehow, we never worked our way up to that level of appliance destruction.

In other news, the plumber showed up around 5:30 on this day. When we last used the shower, last week on the 7th, the faucet developed a rather sturdy leak. Oh, it's been leaking a tiny bit for a while, and you have to fuss with it when you turn it off to get it seated just right. 

But now, the leak is big enough that we have to do something about it. So we did: I looked up who gets good recommendations for plumbing in our local neighborhood Facebook group, and we picked somebody and gave him a call on the 8th. He said he could show up today.

Well, show up, he did. And you might have thought he'd - you know - actually DO something to stop the leak. But no. He gave us an estimate for the faucet repair - and a few other items in the house (he also does electrical work) - and scheduled the repair for July 31st! TWO WEEKS!!!!

In the meantime, we've been saving as much of the leaking water as we can. At first, I just closed the tub drain and saved the water, and I'd scoop it out and use it to water plants, or to wash or rinse this or that. Then, the tub drain stopped working; the water was leaking out! So now, I have a blue basin in there, catching the leaking water, and I put it in other containers and do stuff with it, using as much as we can without wasting it.

I don't trust the tub faucet enough to use it again. Oh no, this is not my first tub-problem rodeo. I know that the next phase, which can happen at any point, is for the dang thing to break entirely, sending shooting water everywhere, such that water has to be shut off to the whole house. (No, the water shut-off located behind the tub never worked properly, so the whole house goes down, sometimes for days, when we have a major plumbing problem.) This is why we've been taking our showers at state parks.

So it looks like we've got another two weeks to deal with this. I am not a happy camper, but it's not nearly as bad as some of the other stuff we've had happen here (like that time we had to replace the water heater, which is a long and amusing tale which you can read in its entirety RIGHT HERE on Blip!), so I am just going to try to tough it out. Wish us luck! Having a house means you always have to deal with something, doesn't it?

Anyway, back to our butterfly, who fell in love with the air conditioner (a thing I just might do myself on the hottest days; after all, I AM Grammy Carvell's girl!). It needs a soundtrack song, and this is it: the Little River Band, with Cool Change. In honor of our household plumbing problems and appliance-tossing tales, I'm back to add a second song from the album - quite fittingly - called Appetite for Destruction, ha ha ha! Here are Guns 'n Roses, with Welcome to the Jungle.