I've been in DM for the last week, cleaning out my room. I only really got three days of work in, and I needed the full six, but at least it's a start on a job that should've been done years ago.
In my absence, Nathan's managed to break the toilet and the air conditioner. The toilet's been off kilter for a couple of months now, and it's doing the same thing my parents' toilet does: the water keeps running. So, if it's a double flush job, you have to wait ten minutes or so between them. I didn't worry about it much, but I probably should have because now it's also not quite flushing. We haven't got a floaty ball thing, so I don't know exactly how to fix it without getting the maintenance in. Maintenance, in all small cases, means the office boy who probably knows as much about the problem as I do.
The air conditioner is totally Nathan's fault. Basically, it freezes up and we have to leave it off for a day to let it thaw out. I discovered why this happens. It's been almost stupidly hot recently (not so bad if all you're doing is living, but I wouldn't want to try to do manual labour), but it's also been at least 75% humidity around here, and that's during the day. At night, it can get positively tropical.
I did some reasearch and this is what I guess is happening. When it gets humid, the water collects inside the unit and because the air inside is so cold, it freezes. Like, a solid block o' ice inside the air conditioner. This means that it's still running, but it's not doing diddly squat. If you continue to run the air, it's possible to break the compressor. How do you avoid this? Don't run the air conditioner when it's that humid.
The problem with this? We live in a basement. If we open the windows in this sort of humidity, the walls will be, while not dripping, considerably damp. Clothes left out feel as though taken prematurely from the dryer. This is not good for electronics, and it's not so much fun to live in a sauna either, so we can't do it.
My solution would be to shut the windows, turn off the air and deal (indeed, I drove two hours through practically 100 heat with the air in the car just barely perceptible- it's OK for me), but Nathan claims that he would melt into a little puddle of green and pink goo if such a thing came to pass. Wimp. We didn't have air conditioning until I was in fifth grade, at which time I was spending all my summers camping. I don't wear shorts in the summer anymore because, while it may be ninety plus outside, any building you walk into is a chilly 68, or feels like it. Same problem happens in the winter time, it's ten below, so you put on your long underwear and boots and wool mittens and gloves to walk ten minutes across campus in freezing gusts of wind, but it's a sweltering eighty (or so it seems) in your classroom.
It would be far easier to, rather than keep the indoors at a constant year round temperature, vary the heating and cooling as the heating and cooling outside change. I think a/c should never run cooler than 75 (twenty degrees below 95) and heat never more than slightly over sixty. I say sixty because I recall living in a dorm for two winters with my window half open in below zero temperatures because I had no control over the central heating. I was wearing wool from head to toe in order to go outside without freezing, but the girls on my floor were still wearing their damned tank tops and flip flops and would complain if it was too cold. Hello? Put clothes on?
But, as long as I live in a nation that does not understand certain fundamentals of dressing itself, and the power to whinge to get its way, I remain without any say on the temperatures around me. If I could at least be at the mercy of the elements instead of some nameless janitor...