My Brain Is Melting

Like the title says, my brain is melting. I can feel it dribbling out my ears, unless that's just sweat. It can be hard to tell the difference between brains and sweat some days, today being one of them.

The reason that I feel like I'm melting is of course the fact that the air conditioner in my hovel is having a tough run of it. The reason our* poor, overworked AC can not handle my crazy demand that the temperature in my apartment be lower than the temperature in my body, is that one of the windows is broken.

We did not break this window. In fact, we can not even pinpoint the time in which said breakage occurred or what caused it. I have my suspicions though. Read on, and marvel at my deductive reasoning.

On Monday or Tuesday of last week, we noticed that it was getting really hot in the apartment. We chalked it up to time to replace the air filter, a not unreasonable idea, since it has been about five months since we moved in and replaced the filter. The first day or two we were here it was almost unbearably hot in the apartment, but then, at a suggestion from Aerisith's dad, the filter was replaced, and lo, we had cool air. Now, five months later, we figured it was the same situation. Aerisith and I waited until Thursday to go buy a new filter, because there was the very real possibility of our being evicted through no fault of out own, and we were not about to do anything like maintenance if we were just going to be tossed out into the street. So on Thursday the outstanding rent was paid, we received assurances that we would not be evicted, and then we had the air filter replaced.

This solved the problem of it being to hot in the kitchen, bedroom, and bathroom. The living room/dining room remained unbearable, and here in the office, my wrists have adhered themselves to my laptop and I don't think I could get up from my desk without hurting myself. Today after church, I was sitting on the sofa eating lunch and watching a DVD from the ole' collection when I heard the blinds buzzing. I thought it was probably just a wasp stuck in the blinds** and figured I would do something about it later. I finished eating, and the noise was still going on, so I decided that later was then, and rolled up a newspaper in preparation for swatting a non-existent bug.

For, when I rolled up the blind to see what was making the noise, I found that the only wasp on the windowsill was long dead, and a piece of glass about the size of my palm was laying there as if it belonged. I looked up, trying to find a source for my potential weapon of opportunity, and found that it had come from the top right window pane. Another piece of equal size was sticking out, held in place only by the weatherstripping. In fact, further investigation showed that the only thing holding the entire pane in place was the sealant around the edges.

The original break in the glass is a mostly round area about half an inch in diameter. Long cracks branch off of it in several directions, so that in addition to the piece already on the windowsill and it's buddy that looked like it was about to fall, the window was divided into two large panels, and then three smaller ones in the top right corner.

I pulled the hanging piece down so I wouldn't have to worry about it falling and shattering into a million tiny pieces in the dinning room.*** Then I tapped up a trash bag to cover the hole temporarily. When Aerisith got home to provide some reinforcements for my hovel-improvement schemes, we set about making a more substantial fix. Tin foil (to try and reflect a little of the sun light and keep the place cool) and a trash bag (to further seal up the window against some rain that is allegedly in the five-day forecast, and to try to keep out precious cool air from getting out) were duct taped into place over and around the break.

When the apartment office opens again Monday morning, Aerisith and I will be there to demand that a repair man be sent to fix this damage that we did not cause.

As for what did cause it, my personal guess is an air rifle. A small, not very dense, high-velocity projectile, which was still not a big enough incident for any of us to notice immediately is to blame here. Of course, since there is no pellet inside our apartment to prove my theory, and I don't feel like crawling around the circus maximus looking for one, I can not prove this one way or the other. The fact that it could have happened any time in the past week does not help any.

Not looking forward to dealing with the landlord,
Yami





*N.B. I am not suffering from MPD, thanks for asking. The reason I'm switching back and forth between the singular and plural first-person pronouns in the body of this post is because I have two roommates. They share in different degrees my level of involvement in this little caper, because they are around the apartment in different degrees. In fact, I'm pretty sure that one of them doesn't know about the window yet, because she's rarely here and neither Aerisith nor I have told her yet.
**Because until the painters came, we had several wasps nest on the exterior of our building. It was therefore not unlikely that one might have followed us inside and then gotten stuck in the blinds in a desperate bid for freedom.
***Something particularly to be avoided, in addition to all the obvious reasons for not wanting broken glass in the dinning room, because one of my roommates has a phobia of broken glass.