Thank goodness for Willis Carrier, that’s the best thing I can say about the weather we had yesterday. If it weren’t for the awesome power of air conditioning I would’ve ended up looking like a sad little wrinkled prune in the middle of a puddle of my own sweat.

I kept the airco dialed back to eighty degrees, just so everything I touched in the house didn’t feel sticky as a post-it note and all my clothes didn’t hang off me like damp rags. Did you know that’s why air conditioning was invented in the first place? Carrier was looking for a way to control humidity in a print shop. He knew cold air holds less humidity than warm air, so he blew air over coils of pipe filled with chilled water and invented the nirvana that we know today as central air conditioning. Also, he made himself stinking rich, or at least I hope he did. Right now, I can think of few inventors who deserve it as much as he did.

We have a hard-core understanding about the use of the air conditioning here at Our Humble O’Bode that’ll make the Texas side of the family shake their heads and doubt our sanity. We don’t crank up the airco first thing in the morning and leave it running all day. We tough it out until at least lunch time before we freak out from the oven-like heat and flip Mother Nature the bird, but yesterday she was trying really hard to provoke a response. Yesterday the humidity was around ninety-eight percent. At ninety-eight percent humidity you can plug in all the fans you’ve got, put them in every corner of the living room and lay flat on the floor in your underwear and you’re still going to feel like a boiled noodle. “You” meaning “me,” and, me being a great big wuss, I cut to the chase, closed all the windows and fired up the airco.

Even so, at a moderate eighty-degree setting the compressor was chugging away practically non-stop, all day long, and the drip tube hanging from the condenser unit in the basement was projectile-vomiting into the drain. Texas may have the heat, but they’ve never had humidity like that, I’ll bet. Not that it’s a contest I’m wanting to have.