The other night when were getting ready to turn in, the outdoor A/C unit (like the one pictured here) came on. It’s been hot lately, so that didn’t come as a surprise, even in the late evening.
What was surprising was the clattering noise it made. It’s not a quiet appliance, but it usually doesn’t clang. Once upon a time many years ago, in a similar situation, the A/C came on, sounding like an F-14. After a minute or so, my wife said, “I wish it would stop making that racket,” which it promptly did a few minutes later…and forever. Dead unit.
Fearing the same situation, I got dressed, found a flashlight and went outside to investigate. The unit is in a small passage between the wall of our house and the fence that ensures we are good neighbors. There’s barely room to squeeze past it to get into our back yard. The noise was still occurring.
The top of the unit has a grating to keep falling branches and leaves from landing on the fan at the top that pulls air into the system. I could see something spinning around like a marble in a roulette wheel and figured it was a pine cone or branch segment that had somehow squeezed through. Upon closer investigation, I realized it was a mouse who had made the worst decision of its life. Round and round it went; where it would stop, no one knows. Before coming out, I had reset the A/C temp so it would click off, but that takes a couple of minutes, so it was still running. Eventually, Mr. Mouse ended up–thanks to centrifugal force–lodged between the wires of the grating.
And then there was a splat and some piece of its innards went flying against the wall of our house. Luck of the draw–it could have hit me, which would have been bad. Then I pried the remains out of the grating and let them fall to the ground for some scavenger to take care of.
I told my wife later that I knew the last thing that went though its head…the fan. (groan)
Music video of the day: Sheryl Crow, featuring Joe Walsh. That’ll get your foot tapping.
I’m enjoying the second season of Dark, the German crime/sci-fi series on Netflix. It’s one of the most confusing shows I’ve ever seen. The time travel element means that two and sometimes three different people play the same character as kids, teens, adults, elderly people, and part of the challenge is mapping who is who. I was so lost when I started watching S02E01, I stopped after 10 minutes and found a couple of videos that recapped the first season, which I watched over 18 months ago. I still felt confused, but after a couple of episodes I think I had it under control.
One of the series’ most interesting concepts is the notion that something can be sent from the future into the past, so that it ends up in the future, where it can be sent back into the past…and it’s never really been created. It’s called the Bootstrap Paradox, and it has been featured in time-travel fiction before, but it’s quite cleverly implemented here. Also, because certain characters are jumping through time in 33-year bites, you end up with the situation that a boy can go into the past and get stuck there, so he grows up and ends up fathering a friend of the boy who was with him when he vanished. Or an old woman who visits her father during a period when she is still a pre-teen. It’s all very twisty and clever, and it’s not obvious any more who is doing the right thing to prevent an apocalyptic event.
