So let me set the scene for you here: Local weather predicts Jax will hit 104 degrees today (Sunday). I've been out at a water park all morning, which was fun, but despite my inch-thick coating of 70 SPF suncreen (and repeated application), I have still ended up with a mild sunburn, mainly on my legs. The house can only be classified at this time as a HOT MESS, thanks to my recent work travel and the Other Half's squirrel-like ways.
Thinking I have all afternoon Sunday to at least start putting things to order, I take a nice fat nap, tired from all that fun and sun. When I wake up, I must have slipped into low-biorhythm mode because everything started to get bad.
First, I realize that the wheezing rattle that one of our two 3-ton A/C units usually makes is gone. No, it didn't just 'fix' itself, it died. It chose to take it's dying breath on the hottest day of the year, thankyouverymuch. Luckily, the one on the master suite side of the house is still cranking. But the rest of the house is hot and stuffy.
I decide to take a shower to cool off, only to find what looks like 100 bugs - ants with wings, to be precise- in their final death throes on the floor of my shower. And in the light above. EEEEEEWWWWWW. WTH?! The exterminator was here literally TWO days ago, and asked if everything was ok inside the house. I hadn't seen ANY bugs in the house, much less this dying swarm, and told her to "just spray outside for now".
Since clearly the universe wasn't done with me yet, I spent a few minutes killing the ants that had escaped the shower, and threw them and their death shroud (some toilet paper) into the toilet and flushed. (I didn't want their little carcasses in my garbage can, ok?) My plumbing thoroughly rejected this action, and promptly spat it back out at me. Not only did the water jet out of the toilet, but to add insult to injury, the whole shebang backed up and flooded the floor with gallons of toilet water. Which I then had to mop.
Completely overwhelmed with the amount of things breaking in my house, and knowing I couldn't address most of them until Monday, I distracted myself by working on someone else's project for the rest of the evening, then fell into bed exhausted at 2 am. After re-mopping the bathroom floor, because I had to try "just one little flush" to see if the toilet would behave. It didn't.
So Monday morning came, and with it the looming cloud of doom that formed over the house yesterday. It was a Herculean effort just to get myself out of bed and functional, overwhelmed as I was. [For those of you who have never seen my house, or don't know me personally: it's not only these things that are overwhelming me. I have a HUGE list of unfinished projects in the house like organizing the office, the garage, the guest rooms, staining and re-installing baseboard, scraping popcorn off of the guest bathroom ceiling then painting it, painting the walls in the same guest bath, mounting the mirrors...the list NEVER ends. I'm always under a pile of stuff to do. Always. And living in chaos because of it.]
First things first, I needed a shower, and wasn't about to share that moment with 100 dead bugs (every few hours or so we'd open the door and hose down the shower stall and wash away 50 more bugs). So I took the light down, cleaned everything, sprayed some really nasty ant/termite killer into the surround around the fixture, and reassembled it. Ok, haven't seen another bug since then, so we'll see if that solved one of the problems.
After the obligatory 2-hour concall for work, I found the number of the people who originally installed the A/C system, and bless their hearts, they sent a guy right over. (When it's over 100 degrees in Northern Florida, these people know they'd better act fast.) He confirmed my suspicion that it was the air handler (which he referred to as "old as the hills", a fact that tickled me a bit considering I'm pretty sure this guy pre-dates electricity itself), and that it wasn't worth fixing. The problem is (because of course there has to be an ADDITIONAL problem today), there's a law in Florida, or maybe it's Duval County, that says that if you replace one part of the system, you have to replace the other so they're all equal and energy-efficient blah blah blah. Basically, the law is stating that because my 23-year-old air handler died, I have to also replace my 6-year old Trane heat pump, (which should run for another 12 years or so) because they are slightly different models. So that means double the already-steep bill I was expecting. (Think $5k instead of $2k. Yeah, not happy.)
Well, bless his aged southern heart, Father Time there was hell-bent on finding a way around this law so that he wouldn't get a $5k fine, and his customer wouldn't have to shell out double. He called the permitting office, and asked them how strict they were about really enforcing that law (semi-strict, as it turns out. They randomly pull permits and check to make sure the numbers on the units are matching.), and if there were any way to make an exception for as case such as mine, since he'd run into about 3 of them just this past week. Mr. Permit said that if he could obtain an email from the manufacturer stating that the two components could work together in the manner required by law, they'd look the other way. And as luck would have it, Papa Time happened to have one of the last units Trane manufactured that would work with my heat pump, sitting brand new in his warehouse thanks to somebody else's cancelled order! Literally, they don't make it anymore, as of a few months ago.
Like I said, bless his heart, he made it work. And isn't charging me extra for the coincidence of having one of very few parts that would work for me in this situation. So it's the bill I expected originally. Still not a small one, but man am I ever grateful it's not $5k! They'll be here Wednesday morning to install it.
So that leaves us with one remaining problem (for now)...the temperamental toilet. The one in the guest bath seems to be working fine, so that leads me to believe it's NOT a septic tank problem. (Please, oh please, let it not be a septic tank problem!) We're on our way to Home Depot tonite to buy a really good plunger and some septic-friendly drain uncloggers. And a lifetime supply of Rid-X, just in case.
Stay tuned, and keep your fingers crossed that things get better here and not worse.
PS - as I'm reviewing this post, I hear a huge noise come from the loft area of the living room - sounding suspiciously like one of the seeming thousands of cicadas that inhabit our neighborhood. Sure enough, our little darling Tortie cat Frijol the Huntress had brought one in, crippled it, and took it up to her lair to torture it until it died. If you've never heard a cicada, it is probably the loudest insect on earth. There's times that the racket they make in my backyard is so bad, I can't stand outside and talk on a phone. So even just one of them in my acoustically-challenged living room was quite startling. The other half was on the phone, so I had to run upstairs with sheaths of newspaper to pick it up with. I managed to toss it outside, but don't have much hope for it's future. Sorry, dude.
