Some like it HOT

So this afternoon Greg and I were driving home from work. We were in my fabulous '96 Ford Escort, which is our daily driver (40 mpg and it would be your daily driver too!), and were noticing that the AC wasn't working as well as it should have. Well, really I was noticing. I don't love it anything above about 70 degrees, so I was cookin'. We had a few errands to run, and while we were at Home Depot I bought Greg a chili dog, and was going to drive us home while he ate it.

Except the AC really wasn't acting right. My car loves me, my car knows me, I've been with my car for 6 years now, and she knows that she can run just TERRIBLY. . .as long as my AC is working well. And we've never had problems until today. So I knew right away when the 3 minute 'cool down' time was up and she was still blowing hot air that something was wrong. And then she shuddered in a positively ghastly way. The temperature gauge soared to 'H' in about 10 seconds. I dove into the nearest parking lot, and Greg (who was a mechanic before he went back to school) did a quick diagnostic.

Underneath the engine all sorts of things were bubbling. He determined that my coolant fan had stopped working, and that we needed to wait for the car to cool off before we could do anything, but we could probably limp home as long as we didn't use the AC.

So we grabbed dinner at the nearest restaraunt, and came back out to start her up again, sans AC. What Greg had failed to mention is that in order to keep cool air blowing over the engine, we needed to FLOOR the heater on the freeway. It's 98 degrees today. I did NOT want to floor the heater.

But, I'm not the mechanic and therefore lose all veto power in the car department. So off we went down the freeway, heater blasting, with the windows down. It was probably close to about 120 degrees or so. Maybe more; definitely FELT like more.

As we reached home, which is a considerable distance from the city, Mr. Positive hollered at me over all the rushing air; "Hey, I think it's a degree or two cooler up here!!!!"

So optimistic.

And here's where the two of us really have different life views when it comes to heat. Because you see, when I'm boiling at 120 degrees, 1 or 2 wee degrees isn't going to really cheer me up.

:)