Another day, another dollar…in which I didn’t get to do anything I wanted to do but ended up working in front of the damn computer all of yesterday. Shoveled another mound of stoont papers off my virtual desk, but didn’t even get to write a blog post.
And…for crying out loud, now as I sit here at 6:30 in the morning the Google calendar tells me I’m supposed to be in Glendale at the Miles of Smiles breakfast for Andrea’s Closet. And I’m also supposed to be waiting for another air-conditioning guy. And I’m supposed to be getting ready to race to Scottsdale for another meeting with another doctor. And I have no idea what the calendar notation for today’s English 101 class means: “Logic exercise: in-class discussion.”
Logic exercise? I have a logic exercise for them? Where? What?
Augh!
Yesterday my neighbor Carol’s AC guy came by in the morning. She was right: he is chatty. He occupied a good hour of my time, but he at least seemed to be honest and straight-talking.
He said the coils on the air-conditioner are shot, bashed by the hailstorm. He also delivered another little revelation: the over-and-under design that characterized the old Goettl AC units is no longer being made, except by one not very good air-conditioning manufacturer. The new ones are side-by-side, and because of the unit’s shape, it will cover up the bathroom skylight!
This little revelation was not something that was delivered by the other guy.
Those skylights cost a ton of money to install. And I can guarantee you, I do not care to have a skylight shaft carrying the eye upward to the bottom of an air-conditioning unit!
So he’s going to track down the cost of an over-and-under unit (i.e., one where the air intake and exhaust vents are arranged vertically instead of horizontally), and he’ll try to find out if anyone makes a more conventional unit that might fit up there without wrecking the skylight.
Meanwhile, the Mast air-conditioning guy is supposed to show up this morning while I’m supposed to be at the Mayo Clinic. He, of course, does not know about the hail damage, because this is the outfit I’ve been trying to fire. Last spring I paid the annual fee to have Mast come and perform the regular twice-a-year maintenance and inspection for both my house and the downtown house, so, despite their new guy having annoyed me beyond endurance, I decided to just quietly let them show up here and do the job, even though secretly I was auditioning other AC guys. Normally they can do their thing without anyone being home, but of course this fellow, the one who tried to high-pressure me into buying a new unit last spring, is going to jump for joy when he sees the bashed-in coils.
I really need to be here when the guy shows up. Guess I’d better cancel the doctor’s appointment.
Carol’s AC guy remarked that he thought the roof showed some damage, too. We’ll know about that when the roofing guy surfaces…I’d better call those people and nag them, come to think of it. And I’ve got to get these people down to M’hijito’s house, too—if my air conditioning and roof were trashed, his probably were, too. His policy has a $1,000 deductible. So with my $2,000 deductible, we could be looking at an outlay of three grand up front…for starters.
If the AC guys have to rebuild the ductwork to save the skylight, I presumably will have to pay for that out of pocket, and it’s anyone’s guess what it will cost. Plenty, you can be sure.
Oh, god. It’s twenty to eight. I can’t even begin to see how I’m going to get to the doctor’s office this morning—it’s an hour’s drive each way. I can’t write a “logic exercise”—whatever the hell I thought that was going to be—and drive two hours to & from a doctor’s office and sit in the doctor’s office for an hour while contending with an air-conditioning guy 30 miles on the other side of town. I’ll have to cancel the quack and hope whatever this new manifestation is ain’t anything serious. At least it hurts less today than it did yesterday. And if it’s what I think it is, another day or two or three won’t make any difference…I’m gonna die anyway.
Okay, so: trying to figure out how to cope with this new financial hit. If nothing is wrong at M’hijito’s house, the minimum cost of this fiasco will be around two grand. I may (or may not) get $1,500 back from the government as a rebate for buying a high-efficiency unit. If I buy a Lennox—which will cover up the skylight—I’ll get another $250 back from that company. But revamping the ductwork and fixing the resulting damage to the roof will cost one helluva lot more than $250. In fact, it probably will cost more than $1,750.
The over-and-under unit does not qualify for the $1,500 rebate.
So I suppose we’ll have to assume I’ll get exactly zero reimbursement and I’ll end up with a unit that costs just as much to run as the old clunk on the roof now does.
The $2,000 can come out of the post-tax fund I’m using to live on for the rest of the year, cutting the life expectancy of that fund by two months. I don’t suppose that’s the end of the world…it’s just flicking frustrating.
And it will become a problem if I have to pony up another thousand bucks to get repairs done on the downtown house. That will cut a fund that was supposed to last for fourteen months to ten, maybe eleven months. And if I have to pay to have the ductwork and the roofing rebuilt…well, say goodbye to any hope of living off that money into 2011.
😯
Well! We’re live-blogging right along here…
The Mast AC guy is on the roof. He’s been banging around up there for the past 30 minutes as though there were were something to actually work on, and now he’s got the heat to come on. This should be entertaining.
I’ve canceled the doctor’s appointment and not been able to reschedule any time in the near future. It will be December before I can get in to see anyone, and by then maybe I’ll be dead. With any luck.
Computer crashed. Downloaded some updates. Fixed the computer for the nonce.
I still have no idea what the “logic exercise” for the English 101 class was supposed to be but will cannibalize one from the 102s. That will take an hour or so because I don’t have the answer key.
Holy mackerel! Now he’s got the unit blowing cold air and making a really weird noise.
🙄
He just tried to sell me a new capacitor for the damn thing!!!!!
I love it! I just love it!
When I pointed out that two different AC guys have been up there saying the thing was trashed by the hail, he said oh yeah—that, too!
So now he’s writing up an estimate for both an over-and-under unit and a high-efficiency side-by-side unit with the cost of rebuilding the ductwork thrown in.
😆
Here he is, back at the door: $6,100 for the over-and-under upon which I get no rebate, and $5,400 for the side-by-side that will blacken my skylight. However, he says they can adjust the ductwork so as to move the side-by-side away from the skylight. Interestingly, he doesn’t say what SEER this thing is; the feds won’t kick back the $1,500 for anything under 14 SEER.
He’s on his way down to M’hijito’s house, where he’s not to do any work on it other than the maintenance I’ve paid for.
😛
The “Logic Exercise” is something I put online weeks ago, for the little dollinks to do in class today. In the course of tracking this down, another little revelation arose, just this moment:
Blackboard somehow hid four papers whose authors submitted them right on time, on December 9. Not seeing them on Blackboard, I figured the students hadn’t turned them in and so gave each kid a 0 on that assignment. Soooo… Now, whoop de doop, I’ve got FOUR MORE mind-numbing papers to grade between now and 1:00 p.m.
It’s 10:50, I haven’t even had a minute to get a bite of breakfast or feed the dog since I got up at 6:30, and it’s time to get back to work.
Good-bye, Mrs. Calabash, wherever you are!
Oh that just sounds awful. I wish I could send some cookies and milk or something to you. (At least that is what always makes me feel a little better).
I may have missed it but wouldn’t homeowner’s insurance cover your problem if it was from hail damage?
The Hartford will cover a lot of it. But because I was feeling so broke during the Summer of My Discontent, I raised my deductible to $2,000.
Now, it must be admitted that $2,000 is a bargain to replace a unit that can cost anything from $5,000 to $8,000. And I do feel like it’s sort of a windfall. It’s just that now is not a great time for me to have to cough up two grand.
Let’s see…the fan stopped working in the car (en route to work in a rainstorm, so we drove with very limited visibility). The repair was ONLY $260.00!!! I’m so relieved.
Hate my Honda Civic Hybrid. In case you’re wondering.
@ frugalscholar… Ohhhhh that’s a good piece of intelligence. Sorry about the lemonishness of it all.
Lordy, but it is so nice to know someone else knows who Mrs. Calabash is.
ON the roof? Can you not put this heat/ac unit on the ground? Did I miss something before I found you? Of what do you think you are dying, or what symptoms do you have? That is, if you have shared this before. You seem so open that I don’t feel a bit nosy, asking inappropriate questions.
@ Practical Parsimony: Yeah, most houses here are built with the units on the roof. The ductwork is installed to accommodate rooftop units. This is remarkably stupid, because a unit is more accessible and can be protected from the sunlight, extreme heat, and–yes, hail!–if it’s on the ground. However, it’s Arizona, so you don’t expect much in the way of common sense.
I always think I’m dying. Runny nose? Must be nose cancer. Headache? Brain cancer. Dizziness? Stroke. Stress attack? Cardiac event. 😀
The current ailment is probably GERD. However, the symptoms of that ailment overlap with several other more ominous epizootics, and GERD itself can lead to gastric cancer. My mother died of what was probably a gastric cancer. Because I grew up in Saudi Arabia, like her I was exposed to a bacterium called H. pylori, which causes peptic ulcers and is the only bacterium proven to cause cancer. A recent test for H. pylori proved negative, however, so I guess I’m not dying of that. Yet. 😉