The Modern Gal's triumphant (and stiflingly hot) return

I initially was unsure about relinquishing control of The Modern Gal. I'm a bit of a control freak and was worried about how she would manage out there with others in the big scarry blogworld. But it was a goal of mine in starting The MG blog to involve other modern peeps in its writing, so now was as good a time as ever. And I'm so freakin' thrilled how all the guest blogging turned out! I love the variety of modern gal and guy topics and voices. Not to mention, it wasn't a bad thing for me to take a bit of a vacation, even if that vacation involved 15-hour workdays. I guess it's safe to say that The Modern Gal handled herself swimmingly while I was gone. She's such a whore capable woman.

There may be some topics that are off-limits in the future (you know who you are), but I'll definitely be looking for more guest posting in the future. I also recommend all you other bloggers out there try it out.

So, now I make my triumphant return. I figured that in my crazy week of work, nothing eventful un-work-related would happen to me. Wrong. I'll bring you up to speed on everything this weekend. Twitterers, apologies if you've heard it all already.

But before I do all that, please allow me to bitch a bit. Today is my hard-earned day off. One of four in a row, yee haw! I didn't even realize how long of a weekend I was getting until Tuesday when I started wondering why people kept talking about their upcoming long weekend. Then I figured it out. Then I figured out for the first time in about four years, I wasn't working on Memorial Day. Score.

Tuesday was also the day when I discovered that the air conditioning in my house wasn't conditioning the air. It was making it hotter. I know this is hard to fathom for many of my blog readers who live in Chicago and New York, but it's already the equivalent of your July here in the south. There's a reason that southerners are so damn religious -- it's because we all know exactly what hell is going to feel like and we're not too fond of it.

So I negotiated to have Friday off, with the idea that I'd have the HVAC dude come for a visit Friday morning and I'd be driving back to Knoxville right after lunch for a completely restful weekend in which I would do NOTHING. HVAC dude said he could be at the house around 10 a.m., I said "great!"

After he hadn't made it by noon two hours late and I hadn't heard from dude, I decided to give him a call. He admitted he'd been doing some training and completely forgot about the appointment. Forgot! This is why the service industry has a bad rap, folks. He said he'd be right there.

In the mean time I accomplished the following:
1. Read all 312 posts in my blogreader.
2. Read some news websites.
3. Ate two meals.
4. Washed, dried AND folded two loads of laundry.
5. Cleaned up all evidence of me living in the house to again make it presentable for showings.
6. Started writing this post.

At 2 p.m. four hours late he called again and asked, "is your neighborhood off such-and-such road?" No, it's off the road that's 10 miles away from there. He again apologized and said he was hurrying.

He finally made it by 2:30 p.m. four and a half hours late. I told him all the things I'd done to try to fix the AC myself, but to no avail, and casually mentioned that I'd installed this REALLY AWESOME PROGRAMMABLE THERMOSTAT ALL BY MYSELF!

You see where this is going, right?

"Let's take a look at that thermostat," he said. I can feel the shame already. Sure enough, there's some little bitty switch on the back that I didn't see and don't recall the instructions mentioning that has to be flipped one way for electric and the other way for gas. And of course it was flipped incorrectly. And one of the wires was too loose to do any good.

He felt bad enough for being late that he cleaned the coils on my compressor unit for no charge "and since you're trying to sell your home, it will be good come inspection time." Still, $90 later and a whole load of I'm-not-the-handywoman-I-thought-I-was shame later, I'm leaving Nashville way later than I ever planned to.

The good news is my house is now feeling more like purgatory than hell. And I have a programmable thermostat that helps me only pay an arm and a leg to cool the house during the day time when it's as hot as the sixth rung of hell people are supposed to be stopping by to look at my house. House hunters, you're welcome. Now thank me by offering to buy the place (more on that later).