"I got hot!"

Remember that old TV commercial for AM-PM where the guy is sitting on the sidewalk in a T-shirt and shorts, gnawing on a hot dog with a big drink in his other hand, and his girlfriend walks up to him, crosses her arms and says, “I thought you went jogging?”. The guy replies, “I got HOT!” She rolls her eyes and says, “In THREE blocks?”

Jack and I are prone to repeating catchy phrases from movies and commercials. Like the one from Disney’s Tarzan, “Mom! Is this water sanitary? It looks questionable to me!” The AM-PM commercial is not an exception. We’ve been mimicking it since the first time we saw it whenever it’s hot.

“I got HOT!”

It’s all I could think about last night as I was attempting to sleep in the oven we call our bedroom.

I swear Jack was thrashing about trying to get cooled off, and he swears it was me throwing sheets around and flip flopping all over the place. I’m pretty sure it was him, though. I dozed a few times and dreamed he was wrestling a llama at the zoo that was trying to escape… I’m just sayin’…

At 2 AM I came downstairs where it was nice and cool and guzzled 68 gallons of water. The wall of heat hit me half way back up the stairs and I knew there was no way I was going to sleep. So I grabbed Jack and we slept on the couch where it was nice and cool.

We’re in the middle of a rare heat wave and it’s just not pretty. I went to go get Kevin today at his girlfriend’s and it was so hot in the car that it physically hurt my skin to be in it and there was no way I could wait for the A/C to cool it down. I had to get out and let it cool off without me. It’s pretty bad when you step out of a hot car and into 100°F degrees outside and feel BETTER! It also didn’t help that when I started the car, the little temperature readout said 110°. Once the A/C kicked in and cooled off the car, the temperature guage fluctuated between 103° and 104°. It supposedly measures the temperature outside so I’m not sure why it read 110°.

Right now the official temperature is 101.2 °F. Triple digits are just too damn hot. We decided today since the whole family is going to camp out downstairs where there is a window A/C unit, we’d buy one more for the living room and office area. The big A/C unit we have in the kitchen/nook/family room is going a great job, but it only keeps the office/living room area (where I work from) bearable.

I called Home Depot first. As always I got a friendly sales person on the phone within seconds of choosing the appliance department who answered all my questions, even when I asked how big the unit I wanted was (it’s going into a small window). She happily went and found a unit and read the measurements off the box for me. She added that we should buy it today as they were flying off the shelf.

I also called Lowe’s after that but true to form, they couldn’t get anyone to answer the call in that department. The call got routed back to the main desk three times… where the lady answering sounded annoyed at ME that no one was answering my call and she’d have to page someone. I sat on hold for ten minutes before hanging up. They lost yet another sale to their competitor because their customer service sucks so damn much. (Normally we’d drive to both to compare ourselves but we’re trying to limit driving time during this heat..)

While at Home Depot, they had a big heat pump model near the air conditioners and a salesmen posted behind it. He tried to convince me to buy one. He claimed it’d save me hundreds of dollars a year.

I don’t buy it. (pun intended)

First of all, why would I pay THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS on a heat pump that would provide me A/C for less than 2 months out of the year that it’s actually needed here, to cool off my entire house when the entire family spends the majority of the time downstairs? Sure it’d be nice to have the upstairs cooled all the time for the one, maybe two, trips a day I take up there. Or maybe if the kids wanted to play up there, but they rarely do. They’d rather be with the rest of us or outside in the summer. So it’s a complete waste otherwise. I have a perfectly good working natural gas furnace that has never cost more than $100 in a month during the dead of winter to heat this house.

Second, at night it always cools off here. Who needs A/C then when you can just open the windows, get your ceiling fans going, and things cool off quickly? Rarely does it stay hot at night around here.

Well this week it will be hot even at night. So we’ll sleep downstairs and save ourselves thousands of dollars on a luxury we only NEED once or twice a year… if that.

P.S. Lowe’s sucks.

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