uh oh A/C

Normally when I go to work, I set my A/C at 80 degrees.  I must not have been paying attention on Tuesday morning, as I accidentally set it at 81 degrees - my poor puppies! 

Normally when I get home from work, I reset my A/C to 76 or 77 degrees.  A couple of hours later, I lower it to 74 - it's final resting place until I go to work when it gets put back up to 80 degrees.  I must have been HOT when I got home from work on Tuesday night, as I moved it straight to 74.

An hour later, I noticed the thermostat was still reading 81 degrees.  Uh oh - this can't be good.  I turned the unit off, waited a minute or so, then turned it back on.  It was running, but just not blowing cool air.  I waited an hour to see if it would cool the house down and nope...still 81.  UGH!  I turned the unit off, went outside with my trusty flashlight in hand to the breaker box and flipped the A/C breaker in hopes this would give it the jump start it needed to function properly.  No such luck. 

I got a work call around 9:00pm.  Called my dad afterwards to discuss it and to whine about my A/C.  He said I could come over, but honestly...it's obnoxious to pack a bag and deal with the two dogs at that time of night, so I told him if it didn't fix itself, the invasion would happen the next night.  He said he considered himself warned. 

When I went to bed around 9:30pm (with the hopes of getting up at 4:30am to work out), I just turned the whole thing off because what was the point of running up the electricity bill for nothing?  I put Bio-Freeze on my one knee that is still bothering me (which also had a cooling effect on my body - yay) and then I filled up the ice bag I use for my sore muscles after my runs and headed to bed hoping that would cool me off while I slept (or tried to sleep).

I twisted and turned for a bit...wasn't sure if it was a direct result of the heat or because I had just started reading The Other Boleyn Girl and didn't want to put it down, so I picked my book back up (that had been discarded after my bubble bath) and read a few more chapters.  I then tried to sleep again.  I twisted and turned for a bit - thoroughly annoying my beasts - and then I finally fell asleep. 

At 12:30am, I woke up to the dogs panting...or maybe I was panting...or maybe we were all panting.  Regardless, I figured we all needed water STAT, so I got us all out of bed and we headed towards the kitchen.  On my way, I thought to turn back on the A/C, setting it at 77 degrees.  Boy am I glad I did.  When I woke up an hour later to go to the bathroom, I was delighted to discover that the house was now reading at 77 degrees.  Oh thank God!!!  I lowered it to 74 degrees, gave my little pups loving pats on their cute little heads, and we all went back to bed.  I woke up at 4am because my knee was bothering me - yeah...it was basically a restless night, so I put some more Bio-Freeze on it and then decided it was probably not a good idea given my lack of sleep and my bad-attitude knee to hit the gym, so I reset my alarm for 5:55am and went back to bed.

When I left for work on Wednesday morning, I double checked to make sure I turned the unit up to 80 degrees.

When I came home, the house was reading 81.  I hoped this wasn't a sign of things to come.  I turned the unit down to 77 and waited.  About 40 minutes later I checked and it was at 80 degrees.  Oh brother.  I mean I guess that's improvement, but not much.  I turned the whole thing off for an hour, though I guess more out of frustration than anything else because when I think about it now I probably just did it more harm than good forcing it to work even harder when I did put it back on.  An hour later, it read 84 degrees - YIKES!  I switched it back on setting it only to 78 and hoped it would work it's magic.  An hour later it read 79 - it was working.  I turned it down to 74.  Before I went to bed it was reading 77.  When I woke up, it read 74.  My honest opinion is that it is just too hot outside for my poor little unit to properly cool this house.  I mean even when I was coming home from work last after 6pm, my car was reading 100 degrees and that was AFTER it had been operating for quite some time (as in that wasn't its resting in the sun temperature).

Please can we get a nice cool front through here or please can it just rain and release some of this humidity from the air?  It's been awful!  I feel so terrible for anyone that has an outdoor labor job - my employees included - I just don't know how they do it!