Wednesday, May 11, 2011

Pros and cons...

We're discovering that one of the bad things about living in a high rise (or at least an older high rise -- this place was built in the 60s, I believe) is that you have to wait for the maintenance people to switch the heat over to air conditioning. And they won't do it until it's already BEEN warm for a certain amount of time, because once The Switch has been flipped, there's no going back until cooler temperatures return and heat is needed again. At the moment, the heat seems to be off... but the air conditioning still isn't ON. And the last few days have been quite warm... and even though I've been keeping the window open when we sleep, I inevitably wake up feeling much too hot and sweaty. Last night was particularly bad, as it was not only warm, but humid as well... When I got up this morning, I immediately stripped the sheets off the bed and headed downstairs to the laundry room to wash them. I don't like feeling gross and sweaty when I wake up in the morning... ick... (What? Nobody wanted to hear about that? Too bad... :))

Actually, when it's not humid and the temperature is just right, I rather enjoy sleeping with the window open. That would be one of the PROS of living here -- I never would've kept a window open all night in my house back in Texas... I'd be much too paranoid that someone would climb in through the open window. Not that we lived in a bad neighborhood -- on the contrary... but if someone WAS creeping around at night looking for a house to rob, they'd be awfully happy to see a house with an open window, wouldn't they? Yeah, they would. But I don't imagine anyone would be so desperate as to scale sixteen stories to get to my open bedroom window here (maybe Spiderman's evil twin?).

So at the moment, I have the "air" on -- which means the fans are just blowing around room-temperature air -- and two windows open in the living room. And since the sun seems to have retreated behind hazy clouds, it's finally feeling a bit cooler in this condo right now. We're supposed to get some rain later today, which should cool things off even more. Who would've thought that I'd have more of a problem cooling off in CHICAGO than I ever had in TEXAS???

But air conditioning woes aside, Rick and I are pretty psyched about the warmer weather. Over the weekend, we walked all over the place -- around Lincoln Park on Saturday, to run errands and buy coffee and tea at Argo... and then downtown on Sunday for dinner at Q (where I was presented with homemade peanut brittle and a "happy mother's day!" It's easier to just politely say thank you and accept the good wishes than to tell a complete stranger that my only "kids" are of the feline variety :)). The walk to and from downtown is really quite pleasant when the weather is nice -- I didn't mind it much during the winter, either, but it took a few minutes to get to a point where my teeth would stop chattering... and after about a mile, my feet and legs would start to go numb. It's much nicer to walk a couple miles with all feeling intact...

And now I'm off to be crazy and work out in my non-air-conditioned condo. But what does it matter? I'd end up getting all sweaty anyway... :) 

2 comments:

G. B. Miller said...

Sounds like the the last two office buildings I'd worked in.

Unbalanced heat and a/c.

Lisa said...

Ugh... it'd be even worse at work, where you have to wear "proper" clothing. At least here I can hang out in shorts and a t-shirt. :) But we're very much looking forward to getting into our new condo, where we'll have our OWN a/c unit that we can use anytime!