Fourth Day of Light, 62nd of Summer, 525 ME (Deneb):  A Southern prayer:

O Saint Willis of Carrier, Inventor of Air Conditioning, without whom life here in the South would be intolerable, we pray for your protection over the worthy vessels that are our outdoor compressors. We pray that they stay filled with coolant and receive thy bounty of a continuous flow of electrical power throughout these Dog Days of Summer.  May our ducts stay clear and open, and our thermostats accurate and reliable. This we pray unto you, one nation, under Trane, with humidity and temperature controlled.  

I bring this up because right now, the hottest time of the year and as a record-breaking heat dome is descending over the eastern United States, my air conditioning is not working. To be more specific, it works, but keeps shutting off and then eventually coming back on again. I first noticed it around 6:00 pm yesterday (why do things always seem to break down right at the start of a weekend or before a holiday?), and the earliest I can get a technician out here to look at it is Monday morning, sometime between 8:00 and noon (which means sometime around 1:00 pm). 

It's tolerable, at least so far. The system shuts off, the thermostat goes dark, and the air stops blowing. The house warms up but the system eventually boots back up again, the indoor temperature initially reading about 80° (I like to keep the house at 78°). My fear, of course, is that one time the system won't start back up, and things will get intolerably warm. But so far, so good, and I'm now about 36 hours away from the scheduled maintenance.      

As Sly Stone once said, "Hot fun in the summertime."