Slightly Off the Mark

I'm rerunning my blog about hot weather from several years ago because, honestly, it's too hot to write.

We had an unusually cool spring, but we noticed a problem during the first heat wave of the year: Our big window air conditioner blew air just fine, but that air wasn't conditioned.

I don't know when the problem actually begun. These things are always found at the worst possible time, like when your furnace breaks down during a blizzard, or your sewer backs up during colonoscopy prep.

And I can't complain, because the air conditioner came with the house--which I bought 35 years ago. In fact, we did an internet search for the model, Sears Coldspot, and learned they stopped making it in the 70s. Our air conditioner survived over forty Indiana summers, and that's remarkable.

I was still in my teens when that thing was made! I wish I'd held up nearly as well.
 

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 When I complained to my surgeon that I was still having symptoms of sinus problems, he stuck a big metal tube up my nostril and worked it around for half an hour. Then he stuck it up my other nostril.

And now I no longer complain to my sinus surgeon--about anything.

Then he asked me how long it's been since I was allergy tested. It turns out people with allergies should be tested every few years or so, because in some cases allergies come and go, such as when you get older and your body starts to break down. Not that I'm describing me. Nope.

It had been ten years, so the next week they used up their entire supply of needles on me. If something swelled up and turned red, it wasn't a rebellious pimple: It was Mother Nature thumbing her nose.

Mother Nature has a big nose.

My entire arm, upper and lower, looked like a Braille dictionary. I was allergic to everything on Earth, half of everything on the Moon, and dust from Mars.

Okay, so that wasn't really true. For instance, I'm not allergic to Timothy Grass, who I'm fairly sure is the lead singer for Three Dog Night. Much to my shock, I'm not allergic to ragweed. Also, although I once had an allergic reaction after fighting a fire in a pine woods, I'm not allergic to pine. There must have been some cottonwood, birch, ash, red cedar, walnut, oak or hickory among those burning pines.

My cat allergy was confirmed, but--surprise!--I'm no longer allergic to dogs. We still aren't getting another one, though: We had the perfect dog for a decade, and he's not so easily replaceable.

Beowulf was very cuddly, and it turns out he never got his dander up.

Otherwise it was all the usual: molds, grasses, dust, politicians, and those dirty, nasty bed mites, which are much like politicians but with higher morals. Plants? Russian Thistle, English Plantain, Bermuda Grass--none a problem as long as I stay here in the good old USA.

Now, all but two of these tested at a "moderate" level. Only two read as severe and one of those was, naturally, Aspergillus, which can cause infections all over the place--including the sinuses.

It's a mold, which is a type of fungus, and (I learned) it can be really, really nasty. Being allergic to Aspergillus is like being especially susceptible to the Black Death.

Then came the real shock, and the second allergy testing at the "severe" level:

Horses.

If you know my wife, you get why hearing that was like being ... well, kicked by a horse.

An entire horse-sized battlefield, loaded with Mark-seeking guided dander.

Wait--she's wearing my hat!

And what are we going to do about this? Well ... nothing. I mean, sure, Emily will clean up as soon as she gets home, but it's not like I'm going to demand she gives up horses. It would be like telling me to give up chocolate, something I'm NOT allergic to. You gotta do what you love.

As for me, I have to choose between allergy shots and trying to get rid of mold like Penicillium, Eicoccum, and that wonderful Asperigillus, all of which can be found on ...

Books.

Guess I'll take the shots.

Hey ... are those books on my dusty carpet?

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Remember: Every time you don’t buy a book, I start sneezing. Save my sinuses.

 This month's newsletter is out and about:

https://mailchi.mp/a19474764019/the-summer-doldrums-and-an-oz-connection

What's the Oz connection, you ask? Well, it has nothing to do with Australia or prison TV shows. Otherwise it's just a little thing, but you have to read it to find out. *insert evil laughter here*

(Yes, I'm aware there are a couple of typos in it--but I can't edit them once it's out. *sigh*)

 Vacation often conjures images of relaxing on a beach, climbing mountains, or visiting places you've never been. Here, in the time of COVID, you can still very much do that. Start with the Travel Channel.

In fact, just go on down the channels, and once you've sorted through the paid programming you might see several places you've never been before. As I write this, part of my attention is on ancient Egypt. You think I could afford a plane ticket for that?

September has long been a big vacation month for us, because after Labor Day my wife's job goes down to weekends only, which means we can go places on weekdays. Well, we could. It's how we've been to National Parks, checked out Kansas and Oklahoma, and saw a total eclipse in Missouri.

My current novel in progress involves a road trip, with transportation that has all the bells and whistles.

But as a virus works its way through the Greek alphabet, you have to wonder if it's not time to catch up on all those books piled by the bed. And couch. And under the bathroom sink. And in six bookcases around the house.

I mean, the next COVID variant is Epsilon, and I'm pretty sure the Epsilon Variant already killed off several red shirts in the original Star Trek series. I have red shirts. Coincidence?

I'm not sure I want to go anywhere until Omega has passed by, and that character isn't scheduled to appear in the Marvel Cinematic Universe until 2027.

Oh, crap ... there really is one! I was just joking.

So I made up a list of things we might do at home during our vacation. I divided them into three categories: Outside stuff, inside stuff, and writing stuff. Yes, it is possible to write outside: I did much of the rough draft of Images of America: Albion and Noble County with a laptop, sitting on various benches around Pokagon State Park.

I figured in good weather we could trim those bushes that, it turns out, don't trim themselves, and don't think I didn't give them a good few years to try. We could also clean out the car, something I try to do at least as often as I trim the bushes.

Inside, we have a plan to move our office, put new flooring in the kitchen, and find out what that rustling sound is in the back of the cupboard. Last time I cleaned the cupboard, I found a can of soup that was gratefully accepted by the Museum of Ancient Foods.

The writing includes the fun stuff--two manuscripts I need to polish a little. It also includes the un-fun stuff: submitting those novels to agents and publishers, getting back on the promotion wagon, formatting a photo book we've been working on for three years, and finding out what's making that rustling sound in the back of my lower left desk drawer. All I know for sure is that my dog refuses to go near it.

Is this what they mean by meta?

How much of this will we get done? Well, I had ideas for day trips, where we could stop, enjoy the scenery while holding our breaths, and then smear on sanitizer. But then my wife hurt her knee, and her friend gave me an electric chain saw (unrelated), which I actually managed to get working. That led to one full day putting my back into yard work, followed by several more days putting my back on ice. Oh, well--we're also behind on our TV show watching. So how much will we get done?

Less than planned.

But it's a vacation, so what the heck.

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 It was a hot day when Jeff Hunter's family and friends gathered to have a meal and remember him last Sunday. I think Jeff would have appreciated that--like his brother (me), he hated the cold. Jeff passed away on January 30th, and if I recall correctly, there was a snowstorm coming in at the time, so it was quite a difference.

We were at the Delt Church Park in LaGrange Co, a place Jeff and his wife Cathy liked to go. I'd never been there, so Emily and I ran up a week earlier, and found it to be a beautiful place. It's in Amish country, so every now and then a buggy would go by. The pavilion Cathy rented was right on the edge of the Little Elkhart River. More about the place here:

http://www.lagrangecountyparks.org/index.php/parks/delt-church

I personally didn't take a lot of pictures that day, being preoccupied with other thoughts. But in this one you can see, in the standing photo to the right, Jeff and Cathy on their wedding day. Toward the left are Jeff and me in our truly horrendous 70s leisure suits, along with our little sister Penny.

The following are photos Cathy gathered together and put up on poster boards for everyone to look at. Different times, different people with him in the photos ... a lot of memories, there. If you click on them, the smaller images should be easier to see.

It was nice to see a lot of people I don't get to see often ... wish it had been under different circumstances. Some weren't able to stay all that long due to the heat, and in the below photo the crowd had started clearing out a little. Mother Nature does like to screw up outdoor plans.

One final photo: Dad (Delbert Hunter) and me. In these COVID times, we haven't seen much of each other lately. I confess I haven't felt up to going out and seeing much of anyone, between my ongoing medical problems, the coronavirus, and everything else that has been going on in recent months. There's also the whole introvert thing--I believe it runs in the family. (Emily took the picture.)

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We had an unusually cool spring, so maybe the problem didn't start with the first heat wave of the year, but that's sure when we noticed it: Our big window air conditioner blew air just fine, but that air wasn't conditioned.

If these things don't happen at the worst possible time, they're at least discovered then.

I can't complain, because the air conditioner came with the house--which I bought thirty years ago. In fact, we did an internet search for the model, Sears Coldspot, and learned they stopped making it in the 70s. Our air conditioner had actually survived over forty Indiana summers, and that's remarkable.

I was still in my teens when that thing was made! I wish I'd held up nearly as well.

One final indignity: The box for the new air conditioner ended up on the old air conditioner.

My house doesn't have central air, or central anything. I suppose we could pump cold water through the hot water radiators and cool the house that way, but ... say, maybe that's something to try. Although the furnace is also over forty years old, so best leave well enough alone.

The air conditioner was set into a window, at one corner of the house. But it was powerful enough to cool the entire downstairs, as long as you set up three fans to blow the air from room to room, in a windy circle that ended with the kitchen air being pumped right back to the conditioner. If you set it up just right, walking through a room can feel like being Jim Cantore reporting for The Weather Channel.

The upstairs is on its own. We bought a small unit for the bedroom, and left the smaller room upstairs to swelter in the summer. We use it as a backup fridge in the winter. Old house problems.

When the downstairs air conditioner, which had its own electrical shutoff and a special plug, stopped cooling the house, Emily went outside and laid her hand against the side of it. Then she came back inside and placed her hand in a stream of cold water until the burning stopped.

Yes, there was definitely something wrong, of the "play Taps at its grave" variety.

Anyone who knows my history will not be surprised to find I'd been saving up for the next big home repair job. After that, it was a simple process of taking the old air conditioner out and replacing it.

It's usually when the word "simple" appears that we run into trouble.

The old unit had been permanently installed in that #@%& window. It had been screwed, hammered, molded, glued, foam-sprayed, and caulked into place. It was as if in addition to stopping air leaks, they wanted to stop burglaries, alien invasions, and Godzilla.

Eventually we freed it, using two screwdrivers, a hammer, chisel, crowbar, power saw, and two sticks of dynamite. (Luckily it was close enough to Independence Day that nobody noticed the noise.) Preparing to install the new air conditioner, I tried to raise the window further.

The window wouldn't raise. It wouldn't raise because it had been installed at the same time as the air conditioner, and was fitted to its exact specifications.

The new unit did not, of course, meet those specifications. But you knew that.

That wrapping on the new air conditioner contains ... a remote control. Unless both my legs are broken, I have no idea when I'd use it.

Keep in mind that Emily and I were doing this work on a day when the temperature was 88 degrees (at 6 p.m.) and the humidity was 107%. How this is possible I don't know, but after an hour we looked like we'd stepped into a shower fully clothed. Oddly enough, the dog didn't seem at all bothered by this--if anything, he seemed happy to have a new window to look out of.

When we finished, I left the pried out metal, the hunks of insulation and piles of screws, the broken drill bits, right where they fell, and simply taped over the areas the new unit didn't cover. Then I tried to plug it in.

Which wouldn't work. The new unit didn't have a special plug.

Some things you should check first. Luckily, there was a more normal plug a few feet on the other side; we turned the new unit on and went out to get a pizza while it was working.

No way were we cooking inside that house. I mean, any more than we already had.

I expect you won't hear much from me for the next couple of weeks, because right after Labor Day we'll be on "vacation". The quotes are because our vacations in recent years have been of the kind people need a vacation to recover from.

My wife or I--or both--have been either sick or injured on every single vacation we've taken since the moment we met. Two years ago she was sick on vacation when a guy hit our car head on, leading to both of us being injured. In a variant of that, five years ago we were happily vacationing at a state park along the Mississippi River when we found out my father had been rushed to the hospital with cancer. (He's fine now, by the way.)

So I'm not expecting much.

In the run-up to this upcoming vacation my mother was hospitalized, and we got bad medical news about two other relatives, which I can't help thinking was a shot off our bow--a little warning that maybe we should just build a panic room and stay in it for two weeks. But no, we usually go for it; and Emily and I are fond of camping, hiking, and traveling to places where we can camp and hike. The question of what could possibly go wrong easily answers itself.

That answer may have come early this year. Maybe it was the hospital chairs, which were about as comfortable as the iron throne made of swords on Game of Thrones. Maybe it's because I've been wearing a knee brace, which could have caused me to lean more heavily on other muscles. Whatever the case, this week I've had the worst back pain since I pulled a lower back muscle three years ago--while on vacation.

It's in my middle back, in the area where I first hurt myself way back in 1983 at a business fire in downtown Albion. We wore heavy steel breathing air tanks back then, and I wore one for way too long, and you can guess the rest. (No, I wasn't on vacation at the time.) Instead of the dull ache I experience almost all the time, this was a sharp pain that refuses to be ignored, kind of like the American election cycle. It hurt so bad that for a few days I couldn't even concentrate on writing.

I could still read. Let's not get silly. (Oh, and about the end of the third Game of Thrones book: What The Living Heck?!?!)

So now I face going into vacation with back pain (oh, and knee pain), which might cut into my hiking time. I know what you're going to say: "Just relax, sit around the campfire with a good book and some music, have a beer ... you know, relax".

I hate beer. More to the point, according to Emily, I suck at relaxing. At the moment I'm thinking road trip, since I can still drive, and there's a lot of road we haven't seen.

 In the evening I could work on a new story, which to me is relaxing. I also have a book to finish editing, which is not quite so relaxing, but might be if I'm typing on a lounge chair along Lake Superior.

There's also the fourth Game of Thrones book to read ... but man, those gargantuan kill-fests aren't so relaxing. Just the same, Emily and I do want to get away for awhile, kind of an escape from reality thing.

At least, until one of us gets sick.

It was a tense day Friday, with the same severe storms approaching us that hit areas in Iowa with damaging tornadoes. Here in Noble County we ended up under a tornado watch and then a thunderstorm warning, and the leading edge looked pretty darned bad on radar.

And there were some funnel cloud sightings and at least one touchdown filmed ... but not in Noble County. Up here it eased somewhat before it hit, with most of the really bad stuff ending up to the south of us. The same system went on to produce tornado warnings in several other states to the south and east. We got some pretty heavy lightning, along with wind and hard rain, but only a few reports of damage. So the photos I took--mostly from my back porch--made it look worse than it was.

There's also a video at the end ... if I downloaded it properly, because when it comes to video online I basically have no idea what I'm doing.

I should use days like this to work on a new story in the Storm Chaser series. Like ... a storm muse.

We also had the grand-twins over during my days off, watched Lego Batman, cooked hotdogs over a fire, and slept. The only way it could have been better would be if I'd gotten some writing time in, but sometimes the days are just full.

Thanks for all your birthday wishes! I'm of an age where birthdays are a mixed blessing: You don't really want to admit to getting older, but it's nice to be thought of.

Emily and I helped celebrate Hunter and Brayden's 9th birthday Friday with a pool party, which is pretty much the only way to do an outdoor kid's birthday party in June.

Bonus video! If it works.

Emily and I gave them a telescope -- always good to keep your eyes on the stars.