Heat

I don’t do well in heat. Seriously, once the thermometer gets above eighty degrees I wilt like a pansy.

With yesterday’s temperatures here topping out at only ninety-five I had a day of doing nothing. Okay, so I watered all the vegetables, plants and flowers and went grocery shopping, but once home I was completely unmotivated to do anything. Something about hot weather causes me to shut down and drink a lot. All I could think about at one in the afternoon was making a frozen margarita but I fought the urge and I’m not exactly sure why, opting instead for copious amounts of water… and a Corona Light with a lime wedge with dinner.

I thought that maybe being trapped inside, because it was a whopping fifteen degrees cooler, I’d attempt some sewing or puppet making or even start working on the fondant flowers for my aunt’s wedding, but instead I opted to watch a movie because the act of doing nothing would keep me from overheating… or so I told myself. And so a half an hour into watching Little Ashes, a steamy biopic about the poet Federico García Lorca and artist Salvador Dalí, I noticed that our television’s color issues were back with a vengeance.

We’ve been having problems with what we thought were the colors resetting themselves, causing dark areas to become muddled with green and purple and eventually make the picture look like a really low quality stream for some time now, even before the TV had its final service before the warranty expired. Understandably we assumed that issue was resolved when the repairman fixed it, but apparently this is an unrelated issue that has to do with the color wheel, a small glass wheel that spins in front of the light. My partner said he’s been hearing what he described as a whirring sound when the television tries to turn on and apparently that sound is the worn out gear that spins the color wheel at 9000 RPM when working properly. Fortunately research I did provided valuable information that this part is available for around a hundred dollars and if you’ve ever worked on a computer could replace it. Unfortunately this part costs a hundred dollars and I wish we would’ve known that was the problem when the repairman came out and replaced the digital board and light bulb, which he would have clearly seen any wear or damage to the color wheel since it is attached to the light box.

And so with today supposed to reach into triple digits, a television that is all wonky, and various animals to watch for heat exhaustion, I may, if I’m lucky survive. If not, I love you all. Well, most of you anyway.