She Lives

Don't panic ya'll.. I'm alive!

When I last left you, I was walking around at home with buckets of perspiration pouring from my body, on the verge of killing Ma and on the backside of a southern fried hissy fit. The situation is considerably improved, but it didn't get better without a Queen-sized dose of drama...

After my last post, I went online and looked at the air conditioner selection at Lowes. I figured the square footage of the trailer and how many BTUs I'd need to cool all of it. After work, I came home and measured the window openings, writing it all down on a sticky note and stashing it away in my change purse. When the Amazon got home from work we hit the road, bound for Scary Hillbilly Town to the nearest Lowe's, about 35 minutes away.

Once there, we had a hard time finding any help, so we figured out which unit we needed on our own. We finally wrangled an elderly man in a Lowe's vest to come waller the beheamouth onto the cart, made the purchase and watched as two more guys loaded it into the back of the truck.

We stopped at Quizno's and while the Amazon was inside getting dinner, I sat outside with my gut churning at the thoughts of making a $399.00 purchase, at the same time that they've cut me back to 32 hours a week at the Asylum. I was stressin' out.

On the drive home, we decided there was no way we could lift the unit in to the kitchen window without help and we didn't have any sort of frame to sit it on. We determined it would be much easier to put it in the living room window, which is lower and faces the porch, where there was an old end table and some pieces of 2x4 that could be used to prop it up, at least for the time being.

Before unpacking our purchase, we had to rearrange all the living room furniture, otherwise the couch would be completely blocking the air.

With that done, we wrestled it out of the box. I looked at the pluggy thing. I had an "oh shit" moment.

I'd bought the wrong voltage. There was no way in hell that pluggy thing was going into any outlet in my house.

I'm too embarrassed to relay the details of the emotional scene that followed. Just know that it became evident that evening that I definitely inherited some of my mother's wonky tater genes. At one point, Ma and the Amazon sat in the kitchen, looking at me with this look of fear on their faces that said "oh holy hell she's lost her shit."

I spent most of Friday morning at the Asylum fighting a sinus/stress/I-lost-my-shit-last-night headache. I'd been super busy all week and I was determined to get all the filing caught up, especially the orders I'd entered for Bubbles' customers. If she came back in on Monday after a week on vacation and started running her yap, I'd have to rip her head off and shove it up her delicate little ass and no one wants that.

So I worked like a busy little beaver all morning while Louise, taking pity on me after I told her about my adventure the night before, got on the phone with her mother, who had just recently purchased an air conditioner, to find out what size she'd bought.

Then.. late Friday afternoon, the fire alarm went off. Now.. we have fire drills about twice a year. We have been trained, programmed even, had drilled in our heads, to grab our shit and run out the door at the sound of the fire alarm... which I did.

Louise? She runs the other way, OUT IN TO THE PLANT TO SEE WHAT'S ON FIRE!

See, we knew there was no way it was a drill. No one was working out on the floor, there were only five people in the whole building working and the HR manager was not one of them. It was mayhem ya'll. There were fire trucks, the town cop (who hitched a ride with the VFD to save gas) and the added stress of PG screaming at the top of his lungs for Louise to stop being so dad-jim nosey and get her ass out of the plant.

We sat outside for about an hour before it was determined that the water pressure had just dropped. They hoped.

None of the managers on duty, including the sales manager, the plant manager and purchasing guy, knew how to turn the beepy alarm off in the office.

"BEEEEEEEEEEEEEP!" "BEEEEEEEEEEEEEP!" "BEEEEEEEEEEEEEP!"

For almost two hours. They finally had to call the maintenance guy to drive in from the next town to come shut it off.

After that fun filled day, I came home and faced the ginormous ac unit that would not work in my house. The Amazon and I did the best we could to waller it back into the box, then back in the truck. We drove back to Scary Hillbilly Town to Lowe's and returned it, without incident. We were blessed with the assistance of a nice young man who unloaded the giant unit from my truck, helped us pick out the best size for our house, with a pluggy thing that would work with our voltage, made sure we had credit for the first one, then rang up the second one and loaded THAT one in the truck.

All with a sweet smile and eagerness to please.

Someone up yonder was lookin' out for me, I'm convinced of this.

Oh yeah and.. it was $275. A little easier to swallow.

It took some serious redneck ingenuity, but by God we got the new unit installed. It's propped up on the end table on the porch. You can still see a little daylight around it in a few spots, but I'll make some adjustments. In the meantime, it's cold as a polar bears ass here in the living room. The rest of the house is comfortable.




I can breathe.

I still had a screamer of a headache all day yesterday, so I doped myself up on just about everything I could get my hands on and slept on the couch in front of the ac while listening to the t.v. set on a 60's Top 40 XM station. I was born in '65. There's something comforting about listening to the same music you used to hear in the car on the way to school with your mom, back when she wasn't nutso, back when she made you feel safe.

And today is a new day. I'm off tomorrow. Maybe I can get back to some sense of normal now.

I hope ya'll have had a good weekend.

Later Taters.