I'm Melting

   So last summer was a bitch, and I sat in my apartment and was miserable. This summer, I vowed that this would not happen. I would not be hot and miserable like I was last summer. But in the area that I live, none of the apartments come with a/c, so I had to take matters into my own hands.
   I decided on a swamp cooler, also known as an evaporate cooler, which works by somehow turning the tank that you fill with water into cooler air. There is some kind of science involved here, folks, but the hell if I know what it is. I just know that the cooler was working. It was too small to cool my entire apartment, but it cooled the couch area so that we had an area of relief in the apartment.
   Then one day I noticed a slightly damn spot on the carpet. It was leaking. I turned the cooler off and let it all dry out and went to my sister's for a couple of days (her apartment is cooler than mine, and even though it freaking haunted, there comes a point where you'd just rather deal with ghosts and ghouls then BE HOT FOR ONE MORE DAMN MINUTE. I was at that point.)
   When I got home I unscrewed all the back filter stuff, cleaned everything out, tried to find anything like a crack in the water tank or something disconnected, but could find nothing. So I got a trash bag out and set the cooler on a trash bag in order to protect the carpet and I turned that bitch back on. Leaking be damned, I was going to be cool. So I let it run, but it wasn't leaking. Yay! I had fixed it. Then, being that I live in Washington, the weather decided to revert back to normal and stop with the heat in the 90's bullshit it was pulling, and for a few days, I either didn't run the cooler at all or I only ran it for a couple of hours. Life was livable.
   Except this weekend, that 90 degree weather was all like, "Guess what, bitches? I'm back." I ran that cooler nonstop. And this morning when I woke up and walked over to the cooler, the freaking carpet was so wet that it splashed when I walked. Fucking A. What is this shit? Water had run off of the trash bag and pooled into the carpet, and I didn't have time for this bullshit because I had to go to work. But I filled the tank up with water and turned it on and kept an eye on it so I could see what it was doing while I got ready, and in less than an hour, half the tank was on the floor. So I turned it off. It's still got half the tank of water in that cooler sitting pretty, so the tank is not leaking. I'm letting the little bitch of a cooler dry out. There doesn't seem to be anything wrong with the damn thing other than the fact that it's upchucking water all over my carpet like it's freaking Linda Blair. In a couple of days I bet it's back to working fine again; I think what is happening it's running too much for the filter thing to keep up with the flow of water, and once it becomes oversaturated, water starts to leak out. That is where the leak is coming from at any rate. It's only a little cooler, I think I need a bigger model. But I could be totally wrong, but wrong or right, I have to let my damn apartment dry out before I get mold, so I can't turn the stupid thing on.
   And of course, today it hit 93 degrees; I'm sitting here yelling at my daughter, "Light is heat! Turn that shit off!" Bullshit, I call bullshit. This is not the South.

The Shitting-Ass Woods Were On Fire

   It's been a while since I've posted. I can't help it, you've all become victims (or benefactors depending on how you view my ramblings) of my Dragon Age obsession. The new one is coming out in October, so of course, I've got to replay the old games and make sure that I'm happy with the paths my characters have taken. Well, that and the fact that I work and have all of my usual parenting duties. And my vacuum broke again and my computer is still being a fussy biatch, but I digress.
   A couple days ago, I was frying squash; a good old-fashioned Southern fry-up, and I was also baking cookies at the same time, because I wanted my daughter to have a treat, since I was having mine via the fry-up, which my daughter hates. And the apartment started filling with smoke, and my daughter is sitting there asking, "Mom, what are you burning?" Which is a fair question, especially when I am cooking multiple things. I am not the most skilled cook, and I get the best results when I do one thing at a time. But, since I was also frying, the oven was not unattended; I was getting grease burns like a pro, standing over my fry pan. But, even though I couldn't see fire, I could smell it, so I shut everything down. Nobody wants to deal with a grease fire.
   The smoke did not diminish, however, so I was looking around for a source of smoke, and I realized that the smoke was coming in through our open windows. Washington, my friends, has been getting 90 degree weather. And we've been dry. Washington does not like to be dry; we need some rain. In protest of the dry weather, the damn woods outside of my apartment had decided to start burning. Straight-up fire, and sitting in my apartment parking lot was a shit load of fire trucks and firefighters. I'd thought those sirens had sounded kinda close. Guess kinda close this time meant right outside my freakin' door.
   It was my day off; I had no plans to leave the apartment, no plans to even open the door, so here I am, in my ratty shirt that's super comfy, in my ratty sleep pants, my hair pulled back in a messy knot, and I'm looking at a drive way full of buff-ass firefighters..... and they are looking at me. SHIT!!! Are you kidding me? But that's not even the worst of it.
   The fire had started on the other side of the woods that are next to my apartment, so they hadn't reached my apartment, but the firefighters had hooked up all their hoses, ready for if the fire did reach this side of the woods. I look back in my house, at my daughter who is also in her slumming-round-the-apartment clothes, and I hiss, "Get dressed in case we need to leave!" Then I look back at my neighbor, who is also out gawking at the smoke-filled lot, and she's going, "That's an awful lot of smoke, my God." And we look at each other and shrug, and then I look at the firefighters, and I decide on of them needs to tell me if we need to get up out of this place. As much as I love my stuff - I don't want my daughter and I to die with it. We wanna live, dammit. So I ask one of the guys if we need to leave or something, and he says, "No, they about got it out." I guess that accounted for all the damn smoke.
    They all left after a few, which I wasn't thrilled about, because, what if that shit starts burning again? But I guess from the sounds of it, a heck of a lot of Washington is burning right now. They have things to do. I know one thing though, I'm not going to be happy until we get a real good Washington downpour. I want shit soaked. All this grass and underbrush is brown and crispy - perfect for burning. I want things to go back to being green and soggy, thank you very much.