It’s been so hot here recently (thankfully, the weather changed for the better after the weekend) that I decided it was time to have a look at the two antique air-conditioning units that top and tail my digs. I had only the one mando, which needed batteries, but that was an easy challenge well within my capabilities. The other air-con didn’t have a control or any buttons or knobs as far as I could see.
I know that the global warming – you can believe it or not, I don’t care – is besieging us and each year it’s a tiny bit hotter, and well, I’m a tiny bit older too.
My daughter sent round a capable young fellow called Ashley (born and raised in the pueblo) to see if he could work his magic.
I thought I had better clean up the bedroom and so moved things here and there, creating some space for air-conditioning mechanics, and discovered why the bedroom unit wasn’t working after I pulled a heavy trunk away from the wall.
Yes, friends, it had been left unplugged.
By the time Ashley arrived, I was down to just one non-functioning air-conditioner.
This particular piece, a relic from the days of Francisco Franco, is in a room full of both books and my computer and is decorated with a cane-and-plaster ceiling which is generally heaving with geckos..jpg)
We feared that the small and amiable lizards probably looked on the rather fuzzy looking box located above the small window as a kind of Geckos’ Graveyard. Switch that thing on and there’d be bits of grated lizard all over the house.
Anyway, it turned out that there is a way to open up these things, and buttons are revealed. ‘Huh. Who needs a mando’ I wondered.
And, it works a treat. Sort of. No reptile’s entrails to speak of.
Now I have to upgrade the computer with a new operating system. Maybe Ashley knows someone. Like the air-con, the old box of tricks has seen better days and it never fully recovered from the millennium bug fright, you remember, when the internal calendar was going to return everything back to 1900: Goodness, how the time has gone.
The power here is erratic, with those annoying micro power outages, which is why I must remember to ‘save save save’ as my late father in law, a retired IBM technician, would say.
To counter this, some years ago I bought an eternal battery (well, good for three minutes anyway) which also controls any fluctuations in the voltage. One can never be sure.
Anyway, it doesn’t work and when the power goes, it goes too.
There’s probably a lizard trapped inside it.