Ugh, bad night

In the interest of saving energy, and even more in the interest of "if there's a short or fault in the appliance, I don't want to be away from it so it can start a fire," I have been turning off the air conditioners and things when I leave the house, and I also shut down the one in the living room at night when I try to sleep.

Last night was not good. For one thing, I had an evening meeting that went until 9 pm. I came home around 4 after lab and turned the air conditioners on, but 4 pm is a hard time to try to cool a house, because the sun is at its full strength and it also hits the front of my house, baking the living room.

And we had a dewpoint of 70 F. This is the point at which health experts tell people not to exert themselves outdoors because it can become dangerous. And wall-unit air conditioners are absolutely pants at sucking humidity out of the air. And I didn't like to run my dehumidifier because that thing throws off a lot of heat, so it's kind of a net loss: you might get the air a LITTLE drier, but it's going to be hotter.

And, as I said, Head Guy came and delivered the bad news about the timing on getting the whole repair fixed.

So then I went out to my meeting, shutting everything down. Returned to a house at 82 degrees and I-don't-know-what humidity. And this is where I part company with the people who talk about how it's more "natural" and "healthy" somehow for people to experience the normal fluctuations of temperature: I felt miserable. I hurt. I was having a hard time breathing (asthma). My heart felt like it was pounding a little (also an asthma symptom in me). Oh, maybe I'd kind of adapt if I had to do this all the time, but if someone somewhere said, "No more air conditioning for anyone ever" I'd be like, "Bye, leaving for the Yukon now."

I went to bed but couldn't sleep. Even with the little window unit on it was wickedly humid in the room and not all that cool. I tossed and turned and had all kinds of distressing thoughts of the sort you have when you're uncomfortable and can't sleep:

"Just watch. The Boss Guy will stop by TOMORROW and will beg you to let them put off the work another day or two because they didn't finish up with the desperate family. Or they'll get someone else who NEEDS them."

"This is eating your life. You haven't even read a single journal article in your field for a week, and this is supposed to be your research season. You are failing at your job. You need to figure out some new research to do. They'll find a way to rescind your tenure if you don't and then it won't matter if your air conditioning works because you won't have a JOB."

"You haven't worked out since Saturday. [I had been using the reason that it's hot and humid] You are a FATTY FAT FAT and you fail at life, and when you go in for your checkup in a month and a half, you'll have gained weight and your doctor is going to fire you and you will wind up going to some drill-instructor doctor who will force you onto one of those diet plans and who will harass you until you starve yourself into losing weight."

And yeah, none of those (other than possibly the first; I have a long history here of workers from other outfits doing the "someone needs us more than you do" bit to me) is exactly logical, but when it's 1 am and you're not sleeping, that doesn't help.

I finally got up and turned the living room unit back on -figuring if it burst into flame at least I'd hear the fire alarm in time to get out - and set up the box fan in the door of my bedroom, thinking if I could suck the cool air out of the bedroom, at least it would mean cool air moving around. I had to set the fan on the lowest speed because otherwise it was like being on a jet taxiway because of the noise. That helped some. I estimate I got about 3 hours of sleep last night. I'm not happy.

I really, really, really hope the family that I got bumped for appreciates what is going on. I think this is what I often find hard about "loving your neighbor" in this way - you have to take it on faith that the other person (a) appreciates and is grateful for the favor (because otherwise, it seems to diminish the whole situation; I have dealt with far too many people in person who, after demanding some huge favor on your part that took a lot of your effort, then acts as if that were their due) and (b) weren't playing up their situation or being demanding or anything like that - where they were genuinely in more misery than I was last night.

I don't know. I think if the guy DOES try to put me off another day (which would turn out to be two, because Thursday*).I am spending a night in a hotel. I can just skip a meal a day for a while and that will also solve the weight gain problem. (I am being slightly, but not totally, facetious there)

(*As in, I am pretty much in class from 8 am until 5 pm, and I'm not going to do something like leave a key under the mat for the guys.)


Edited to add:

It's possible some of the poor sleep was my introvert self having a hard time relaxing after being around a lot of people. I often get that way after evening meetings. I even tried sitting in my dark living room and watching mindless tv for a bit but that didn't help.

I think my plan for this afternoon is this: stay in here for office hours (air conditioning in the faculty offices is again sort of grudging and minimal. I was talking to a retired faculty member from my department last night - she has been attending church here recently and has joined the women's group - and remarked that I missed the ceiling fans we had in the old building we were in when I first moved here. Really, ceiling fans are a great invention; having air moving around makes things better, and I would suspect one wouldn't need to cool quite so hard if one could get some air movement).

I'm going to do my grading and write the minitest (sigh, it never stops) for this week, and if there remains office-hour time, I'll dig out the unanalyzed data from years of monitoring a prairie restoration and see if I can maybe spin it up into something potentially publishable. And then I'll go home, crank the window unit, do some of my piano practice, and once the room cools a bit, try to do the workout video. I think part of my distress is not working out - I tend to have a lot of nervous energy that getting a regular workout seems to drain away, and of course it shuts up my inner Guilt Monster about "you're not taking care of your health"

And then I'll wash my hair. Not sure what I'll do for dinner, something cold, I suppose.

What I really want? For my air conditioner to be fixed. And also for my burnt-out-motor ceiling fan to be magically replaced without me having to do all the heavy lifting of comparison shopping and cleaning out my awful messy bedroom first. And for the back fence to be fixed (yeah, that's still an issue). And for my allergies to go away. And for it to be less humid. 

And I realized: "Hey, this didn't seem so awful (using the window unit) last July during the blower outage" and in fact, the first night I had it in and running it made the room TOO cold for me (66 F). But that was July, and it was a "dry heat" - at least, as dry as we ever get here. I think really the high heat indexes are what is making everything so miserable and making the airconditioners labor (and drip water outside - there's a regular drip off the living-room one when it runs). And it may have been a factor in everything icing up in the old whole-house unit.

Of course, wishing for it to be dryer out won't make it so. But I wish it were; I wish all the water that dumped on us in May could quietly go back to the Gulf of Mexico from whence it probably originally came without hanging around as a nasty haze in the air for a couple weeks first.