As the title suggests, it has been a nightmare this week! It started last weekend with Droplet’s emergency triage. I talked about that a little and I’m not going to go into the gross details, but essentially the whole situation ended up with us sitting in the car at the (closed) shelter while a skeleton staff worked to get the kittens tested and treated. Because of the major heat wave that we’ve been in for most of the last month, it was already almost 100 degrees at 10am, and after almost an hour of being in the car with no shade and the a/c on low (because otherwise it would have been literal killing temps in the car), our engine overheated. We had to ask the staff to let us sit inside the hospital despite it being closed, which thankfully they allowed. Also thankfully, a half hour later when the kittens were ready, the car re-started without a problem. We got the overheating warning early enough to (hopefully) not cause any permanent damage to the car!

Then there was the a/c in the house. We replaced the entire unit, indoors and out, in 2020. Since then, it has failed multiple times. I suspect something was done wrong when it was installed, or perhaps it’s the crappy build of these mid-90s houses that is contributing. Either way, we noticed that the a/c wasn’t working well in the afternoons starting about a month ago. We normally keep the temps around 77 in the house – any lower, and the unit tends to freeze over – but it was getting up to ~81 each afternoon. At first we thought it was the heat wave, with temps at 105+ on some days. It was catching up every night, so we worried, but not too hard. We also did some preemptive work: changing out the filter several times, making sure the drains weren’t plugged, checking for leaks. We also started texting our hvac guy, who didn’t respond for WEEKS until Saturday night, at which point he said he’d call sometime on Monday to make an appointment.

Unfortunately, Sunday seemed to be the beginning of catastrophes, and instead of getting up to 81 in the house, it got up to around 85. It was boiling. We went out to get a window unit for the living room and some extra fans for the bedrooms, but even then, it was miserable. Sunday night, I didn’t sleep. At all. Literally. I finally gave up trying around 4:30 and got up, shaky and sick. There I found that 1) it was still 80 degrees in the house, so the a/c wasn’t catching up, and 2) Jason was sick and shaky on the couch. We’d ordered out the night before so we didn’t warm up the house even more by cooking, and most likely he got food poisoning from his meal. He spent the whole morning throwing up and feeling ghastly, his skin waxy and yellow and clammy. We didn’t know if he caught something from Droplet (it can happen) or if it was food poisoning, so he was in quarantine during the early part of the day.

Meanwhile, the a/c continued to get worse. The drain, when checked again, was a tiny bit slow, so we ran a drain snake through it as best as we could. While that seemed to help slightly, and by 2pm we weren’t any hotter inside than at 4:30am. Only then, the coils froze (probably because of how hard it was trying to catch up), and the entire unit was out of commission for about 8 hours. In the middle of an afternoon with 104 temps outside. Oy. At 10pm, it was about 83 in the house and again miserable, but after an entire night with nothing but a 1.5 hour nap mid-morning, I took a heavy sleeping pill and crashed.

Thank goodness, I woke up to a gloriously cool morning. Our a/c had started working in the night, and had caught up. In fact, it had overcompensated slightly and gotten us to 75 degrees. Hallelujah!

The good news: 1) Jason did in fact seem to have food poisoning, and started feeling better Monday afternoon. 2) While the a/c still struggles during the day and it tends to get up to 79ish, that is a far cry from what was happening before, and so far we’ve had no more coil freezes. 3) Droplet slowly improved on her meds and by Tuesday, was starting to very slowly gain a little weight and have improved energy. By Thursday evening, she was almost back to where she was pre-illness. 4) So far at least, our car has been working fine.

The bad news: Our hvac guy did call late Monday evening and scheduled to come on Thursday morning. However, he didn’t come, but instead put the appointment off multiple times that day. Then didn’t come the next day as promised. Now we’re told he’ll call “sometime next week” to reschedule something. So the a/c is still limping along, but thankfully never as bad as those nightmare days.

At least I got to end the week with an engagement photoshoot for a client who also happens to be one of my oldest friends, as well as some time out with my siblings who are in town for the weekend. Jason and I also ended up picking up Puddles’ and Droplet’s brother, Smudge (above), to join them. He’s underweight but had just gotten healthy with his former foster (also the girls’ former foster), so we need to help him catch up to his sisters and get the whole litter better! Smudge-photo for cat-tax on this depressing post, heh!