Climate Control

Sounds like my SF peeps are finding out what a Boston summer is like.

Yeah, those window AC units indeed work. It was pretty much the first purchase I made, even  before any furniture, when I moved into my first studio, in Boston, later named The Magazine Apartment. It was on Park Drive, like everybody's first studio in Boston is, and I was enthralled with the ancient elevator with its doors and the grate, and the long corridors and the hardwood floors and my view on an alley because it was all so American.

I bet Fred got me and the box home, and I remember tfarrell and me just lying down on the floor after I first switched it on and going "Aaaaaaaah..." which means I must have gotten over my trepidation of just putting this huge heavy thing in the window and leaving it hanging there, held in place only by the wood of the sliding window, which had to be rotting, but hey, everyone else was doing it so I guess this is how you do it in the USA, and fuck it is hot in here. It also meant I had no furniture yet.

That AC died when pinkfish and I moved -- well, I wasn't there for the actual move -- from the next apartment to the condo on The Fenway he had bought. It died in the exact way I feared I would make it die: when Dean tried to take it out the window, it fell out backwards three stories down. Oops. I was told it didn't even make much of a crunch, more of a thud. And although this was a front-facing apartment, it didn't fall on the sidealk where it could hurt anyone. I remember coming home from the family holiday that had made me miss the move, walking into the new condo and going "Oh you put the ACs there and there wait, that's not our AC." Then I got the story. Which ranks second on troublesome homecoming stories to the time a few months before that I had come back from whatever to have Gadi, our houseguest at the time, tell me a litany of one problem after another with paperwork and Dean's start-up and the this going wrong and the that being wrong, that ended with the sentence "Oh, and the dishwasher only burned for a little while." Compared to that thudding ACs were not that dramatic during a move.

So yes, you learn to keep the doors and windows closed in summer too, and that inside is nicer than outside which it should never be in summer but hey, it is, and how high to set it at night and by day and when you are at work, and that getting new ones actually is worthwhile because they get more efficient all the time, and quieter so you get to sleep. Then the energy bill comes in and you learn you really should be a little uncomfortable. Like in winter, when you put on a sweater instead of turning the heat up. Then I moved to Los Angeles where everyone has or should have central air, and I had Industrial Central Air in The Loft, complete with huge overhead ducts Oliver the cat liked to run on, and where energy was pretty much free compared to Boston. Still, after my first few months of turning it up at night becaise I like to sleep in a cool room snuggled under blankets, the bill came in and I decided I should cut that out. I moved to the desert, now feel it.

Oddly enough, even though there was a string of Summers That Killed Thousands here in the UK a year or two ago, there's not a big market for these in-window ACs here. I don't think many windows slide up anyway. On the East Coast you know summer's here when the students leave and the window ACs start appearing in stacks at the hardware store and the Best Buy, here you just open windows against each other and hope for a breeze. Not even much need for that this year: we've had two nice weekends, and the rest is gloom