April Showers, Part V: As Predicted

 As predicted, the AC has died.

I awoke Friday morning around 2, to feeling it blowing/moving no air whatsoever, and I went downstairs and turned it off. It took a few minutes for the system to shut down, but it did finally turn off. I was sure it was out of refrigerant, as even Thursday afternoon and evening I didn't think it was blowing that much cool air. 

Luckily, the weekend was much cooler than normal and we were perfectly comfortable. The past two nights we've had the furnace running, even, since it's been so chilly.

Our HVAC company came this morning to take a look. After much discussion, we're likely going to go with a new unit and bite the financial bullet on it. Our home warranty will cover some of the repairs to it, were we to choose repairs -- a new coil and refrigerant refill, and not even all of that -- but it's a 50-year old unit and the home warranty will not cover a replacement, despite an AC being part of what we have a home warranty for...similar to our furnace. No, this will be all on us, just like the furnace was. 

Both of us are very bitter about that. While the home warranty has saved us a lot of money on a lot of things over the years, stuff like the furnace and AC, which were supposed to be covered under it, were the main reasons we keep renewing it every year. To have neither of those covered and to have both of them fail in the span of four months is really frustrating and disheartening. It's supposed to be 85 degrees tomorrow and we have no AC to help mitigate that. Daisy will likely need to set up the portable AC we have just to make the upstairs of the house bearable while we wait for the plans for the new unit to be installed.

Yes, that's a thing. The HVAC folks are getting back to us either tonight or early tomorrow morning with a few options and cost breakdowns. We were told that were we to just get it repaired, refilled with refrigerant, and left as-is, it would be something like $2800 all inclusive. To get an entirely new baseline unit without any special bells and whistles (it's not like we have a giant mansion or anything, this is a small two-story house) that would suit our needs, it would only be about $1k more. Costs go up from there for the higher-end models, of course. If I were confident that a major part wouldn't blow on the old unit again I might have been tempted for the repair and refill of coolant, were it a lot cheaper. But it's not, and if we can get a new unit installed and set up for a bit more, then all the better. So that's the option we'll be going with -- one of the new units of some sort. The tech said even the low-end models would be a major upgrade to what we have now, so that sounds promising at least.

So...once they get back to us, we'll pick our option and will go forth with everything as possible. Our HVAC tech was confident they could get someone out this week at some point to do it. The problem is that I do still have to sleep, and have to be able to sleep during the day every day -- that can't be avoided and I certainly just can't be like "well, guess I don't sleep today before I work my eleven-hour overnight shift." While the AC unit is, of course, outside, it's not like them ripping out the old one and putting on a new one will be fast or quiet, and I believe they still need to change out a coil on the inside of the house too, in the furnace closet. Daisy has the option to take VTO -- voluntary time off -- unpaid time, and she may end up doing that just so she can supervise and so I can try to sleep. 

Sleep today is a wash; I was awakened around 11-something when the HVAC guy arrived and was not able to get back to sleep since. So, I have a grand total of about 2.5 hours of sleep in me for the day, and I just have to suck it up and deal with it tonight as I work.

This is not the only stress we've had to deal with over the past few days, by the way.

I mentioned earlier that Daisy had a rock fly up and hit her car windshield, sending a big wide crack slowly creeping across it -- and that we had an appointment to have the windshield replacement people come out to put a new one in for us, right in the driveway.

Well...

When said people arrived early on Friday morning, they examined the car and weren't sure they would be able to replace said windshield. Why? Because there is a lot of surface rust on our nearly 20-year-old car, especially at the edge of the roof where the windshield meets the roof, and if that rust had penetrated deep enough, it means the windshield is unsafe and while he could take out the old one, he could not install a new one. 

That's right, y'all -- we were told that a dime-sized rock that cracked our windshield could essentially total out our car. If a new windshield couldn't be put in it after the old one was removed, the car would be useless and we'd have to sell it for scrap, because (obviously) you can't have a car without a windshield. 

So imagine this scenario -- you haven't slept much, the AC in your house has died, and at 7:45 in the morning there's a glass technician in your driveway telling you that you may need a new goddamn car because a pane of glass in it may be irreplaceable -- and, of course, you also have about five important errands to run that day where, ahem, a windshield is goddamned necessary.

Luckily, the rust was cosmetic only. The glass technician was able to grind it off and seal it (I'm guessing with Rust-oleum or something similar) and he put the new windshield on without issue. So, that's one crisis averted, at least. Had we been forced to essentially go get a new car I am sure I would've lost about 30% of the hair I have left due to stress. 

"You watch," I told Daisy, "the first time we take it out after it's been fixed, another rock will fly up and break it again."

This has, thankfully, not happened.

Anyway.

The great purge of 2026 has completed. This afternoon, I finally finished sorting everything and putting it all away in its new places (might as well do something if I can't sleep) and wrapped up the last three bags for one final run to Goodwill. In the end, I believe there were 11 or 12 total full 30-gallon Glad bags of donation clothes that I filled, and I cut my wardrobe roughly in half. There are legit hundreds of hangers scattered around the closet, some of which I will still use and some of which will likely be donated or recycled with everything else. 

Through all of it, I looked back on the person I once was compared to the person I am now. So many pairs of shoes and flip-flops were donated, some I'd only worn once or twice and some I had never worn once, still with tags on them. Some of the shoes, especially the unworn ones, were essentially fossilized -- canvas shoes that had become hard as a rock just sitting in storage. I was sort of stunned at that. No, I'd not worn them before, and the ones I had I hadn't touched in ten years or more -- but they felt like they'd turned to stone. I'm sure they could be reworked and softened up again, and I'm sure they'll get a decent home with someone, but that was fascinating to me.

I found two giant packs of tank top undershirts, unopened and unworn. I vaguely remember getting them off Amazon when they were on a deep discount sale many years ago, citing at the time that I'd never not have a use for them, as they're the one item of my wardrobe that wears out faster than any other -- but for the life of me I have no idea how long ago that was. The fact that they've sat there stuffed into a corner, still in their plastic packaging shows what a hoarder of clothing I really was.

Not to be outdone, I found an unopened pack of black thermal (long john) undershirts and an entire unopened 12-pack of the Dickies socks I like as well. I don't remember buying either of those either, honestly. I know I did at some point, but I absolutely do not remember it. 

No, I'm not donating any of those, by the way -- I will, eventually, get to them. They were socked away (no pun intended) into the storage tubs with all of my winter clothing, which has now been swapped out for summer shirts in the closet. 

As I was going through a lot of my stuff I remembered the person I was when I procured a lot of it, and pondered on how much I have changed since those times. I got rid of some stuff I've had for well over a decade -- not just the shoes but pants, shorts, hoodies, t-shirts. Especially t-shirts. I could not tell you who the man was that purchased all of those things, because he doesn't exist anymore. He existed once, he wanted those things once, and now...he doesn't.

I remember in grad school, easily 15 years ago now, how one of my colleagues said that once you turn 30, it's time to get rid of the band shirts and the comic book t-shirts and cargo shorts, the flip flops and hoodies, and by age 30 how you needed to look more put together and adult. This man, at the time, was I think older than I am now -- he was the oldest member of our graduate studies program and the only one who was on the nonfiction track -- he wanted to be a travel writer, a nature writer. I think I've mentioned this story here before.

While he was a genuinely nice guy, I disagreed with him then and I disagree with that sentiment now. You're going to get older no matter what; how much you choose to "grow up" as you age is entirely up to you. My dad will turn 76 this year and has an incredible comic book and music collection, as well as a large cache of nerdy t-shirts he actually wears. Daisy's father is 78 and almost every time I see him, he's wearing some tie-dyed clothing that he's either acquired over the years or that I've personally made for him. Our mothers, both mine and Daisy's, love the tie-dyes I've made them and wear them all the time. Daisy's mother is older than mine by a considerable degree, and she has purple hair right now, as well as a giant Grateful Dead record collection that I digitized for her last year. 

You do you, I say, to one and all. Every year I get more music t-shirts that I adore, on purpose, and wear with pride -- the latest have been the Tragically Hip shirts I've collected over the past year or so, but some others I've acquired recently are shirts displaying Kiss, Ghost, Nirvana, The Traveling Wilburys, Gordon Lightfoot, AC/DC, Poison, Motley Crue, Willie Nelson, The Smiths, and The Beatles -- just to name a few I remember off the top of my head. 

Every year now my hair is at least three or four different colors depending on the month and its length. 

Every year now I tend to gravitate more towards comfort than fashion. I think I've worn jeans maybe twice over the course of the past year or so -- it's been sweats all other times.

Every year now I care a little less about what I'm supposed to be looking like or dressing like or the attitude or demeanor I "should" be exhibiting for someone my age. 

What's important to me is that I have what I need, I am what I need to be, and I am happy. 

As the days pass, I'm looking more and more forward to getting to Canada for a week. Yes, I know it's expensive. Yes, I know that travel -- especially international travel -- is long and arduous and takes so very much energy out of me, out of all of us really. But I have fantasies about being in a bed in a basement in a house in another country and knowing that I have zero things to do at that moment aside from play on my phone, read a book, or watch something on my Kindle -- that I am free to eat and sleep and just sink into my environment without having someone else's schedule or responsibilities forced upon me. Five full days of family, togetherness with Daisy, and peace. Days where the rest of the world stops, days where my job will find me inaccessible and out of the country, days where I will sometimes eat authentic Canadian poutine and drink Tim Hortons coffee in the span of only a few hours between them. 

Elon Musk says he wants to be the first person to die on Mars; I want to die in Canada. There's a difference.

Not this trip, of course, but when it's actually time for me to kick off this planet, I want it to be up there. I feel more home there than I've felt anywhere, anywhere, in my life. I can't tell you why. I don't know why. I certainly don't have any ancestry (that I know of) from Canada. But, it has a pull on me. It calls to me again and again, and has always called to me more with each visit. Sometimes when I dream, I dream that we're driving those familiar roads around the family homestead and up on Cape Breton Island. I've memorized every turn, every view. I know what the air there smells like, what it feels like. I long for the misting rain on my skin and for the low rumbles of thunder as a storm sweeps over the sea-facing hills. Nova Scotia is the only place I feel I have ever truly belonged. 

It also seems like we may be getting a taste of similar weather on Thursday. We've been told by the weather people that Thursday has, at present time, the best chances all season so far for severe weather in the Omaha area.

Now, I take all of this with a grain of salt. We've had severe storm chances multiple times this season already, sometimes significant ones, and it has all gone south and east of us every time so far. But, this is Omaha in April, and in April anything goes for weather here. We've had some of our worst storms and tornado scares in April, pretty consistently, since I've been living up here. So far this year we have been really lucky, but I'll remind you that almost exactly two years ago this week, there was the tornado outbreak that tore up a good chunk of this town, especially north and west of us, that was bad enough to where cleanup crews worked for a few weeks to get all the debris and tree limbs taken care of and to get power restored for those people in the area that got hit hard. 

So, we'll see I guess.