Fingers Crossed for the the AC

The air conditioning unit on the trailer continues to produce some cool air, although not as much as we know it's capable of producing. Combined with it having iced up a few nights ago when there was a brief spike in overnight humidity, we think it's simply low on coolant. We found the service manual for this model online, and it appears to use R-22 coolant. While you can't build new R-22 air conditioners anymore, it's legal to produce coolant and recharge older units (as long as you carefully recover any existing coolant for recycling) until 2020. Therefore, if the A/C repair company can do so, we'll have them recharge the unit and worry about replacing it sometime in the next decade. We hope.

In the meantime, it's a couple of degrees cooler today and cooling just slightly here in Fernley, although still unpleasant in the direct sunlight. Lisa moved one of the insulation pieces that we were using last year to seal the south (unheated) end of the house over to the living room to partially cover the windows. Basically the only fully-inhabitable room in the house is the living room and that state of affairs will continue until we can scratch up at least $5K.

Yes, I reckon we could probably afford the repairs sooner if we'd skipped Westercon (except we needed to get Lisa's stuff from Oregon anyway) and if we didn't go to Worldcon. It's a tough call.

Security Madness

Good thing I'm not in the UK, as my use of the five-rings logo as a userpic would allow the police to enter my home and seize my property, it appears. So would linking to the London 2012 Olympics web site in a derogatory manner, as I'm doing right now.

See this post for links to articles on how the UK has passed special custom-written laws that effectively say that free speech doesn't apply to the Olympics, the London Olympic Committee can tell you what words you can use (not just trademarks), and how London is being turned into an armed camp for the duration.

( Consistency with my WSFS service mark hat )

With luck, they won't decide that having the military occupying the city isn't a good long-term idea. If I lived in London, I would have been long since been trying to figure out how to be out of the city — preferably out of the country — for the games this summer. My sympathies go out to flickgc, drplokta, and my other friends who live in around London, who it appears may be prisoners in their own homes for a month or so this year.