#010 But It's a Dry... Cold?

Okay, so I tell everyone to sign up to blogsite so you can get all my posts, and then I stop writing. What the heck is wrong with me?

But it’s a dry…. Cold?
Yesterday, it was cold. The temperature dipped to 38 degrees in the morning, which means winter has officially arrived in Arizona.

In the ten years I’ve lived here, I’ve noticed something about Arizona weather. There are basically two seasons: Unbelievably Hot, and Cold. We have that Unbelievably Hot Season where the heat is so strong all the buildings appear to be moving from the heat emanating from the asphalt. We also have the Cold Season when the weather is so cold you wonder if you still live in the desert. In other states, there is a transition time known as spring and fall that separates the extreme heat from the extreme cold.

In Arizona… not so much.

I think our “fall” lasted about 2 weeks. Even then, it was still pretty hot in the day. The nights were nice, the days I could do without.

Now it is just cold.

We learned how cold it was because of our air conditioner. It is cold at night, thus requiring heat, but it is warm in the daytime, thus requiring the air conditioner. We decided to not use our air conditioner or our heat. This meant our house was about 90 degrees in the daytime, and nearing 70 degrees at night.

We have a temperature threshold in our house. We normally keep our house at around 83-85 degrees. I know for nearly everyone else in the world, this is too hot, but for my family it feels great. We love to be warm. We hate to be cold. We don’t get many visitors to our house. When we do, they complain about the heat. We don’t know what they’re talking about.

We love to be warm.

When the temperature is this hot, 80 degrees becomes cold. It becomes “blanket” weather. Again, many people will not be able to fathom throwing a blanket over them in 80 degree temperature, but we break out the goose down comforter.

Did I mention we love to be warm?

Now that you know how warm we need to be, you can easily understand why 70 degrees makes us feel like icicles are forming on our eyebrows. You can understand why the mere thought of coming out of the goose down comforter and turning on the shower is a horrible thought. Even worse, turning off the shower and getting exposed to this frigid temperature wet. For normal people, imagine your house is about 40 degrees. Ugh!

We need to turn on the heat. One problem though; we can’t.

As it turns out, we recently had an issue where our air handler was leaking. The air handler is conveniently located in a tiny crawlspace above my boy’s bedroom. This leak resulted in the boys room raining water down onto their mattresses. Luckily for us, one of our boys still has occasional accidents where he can’t make it to the bathroom, so we’ve have to defend his mattress from that. We also took the extra precaution of protecting his older brother’s mattress too. All of this paid off in huge dividends when the rain came. Sure, we had to wash all the sheets, along with the “pee-guard,” but the mattresses were saved! Yeah for the parents! We planned ahead.

But, I digress.

In repairing our air handler, a lot of particles were generated. According to our A/C guy, this meant we would need to call him back in the winter, prior to turning on the heat, so he could clean out the “furnace” portion of the air handler. If we didn’t do this, the particles generated could become a fire hazard… right above my kid’s bed.

Anyone wondering why he didn’t just fix the problem right then and there? Yeah, me too.

So now it’s cold, and we can’t turn on the heater. This lasts for a couple of days, because in a house filled with boys, it is very hard to find time to do anything. My wife finally takes care of it, and we can finally experience the joy of waking up to a warm house.

Warm… and dry.

Anyone who lives in Arizona knows that the air handlers do a great job of sucking any conceivable amount of moisture out of the air. You know how people living in Arizona will always claim “it’s a dry heat?” Well, this also translates to dry air. Have you ever gone to sleep in dry air? You tend to wake up with bloody noses. Well, my kids do anyway.

Now we enter the bloody nose season. Nathan is by far the bloodiest of my children. He used to scare baby sitters and anyone who watched him because he would wake up with a face full of blood. When we took our trip to Thailand last year, the flight attendants thought something was wrong when his face was full of blood, and his clothes were stained with it as well. They were probably more concerned when they saw that his parents really weren’t that concerned.

Hey, you get used to it.

So the “bloody season” is upon us again. Now we have yet another reason to wash the sheets. I honestly think the accidents happen because this particular kid likes the concept of clean sheets every evening.

Move to a hotel.

I bought a couple of air humidifiers in the hopes of reducing the blood portion of this equation. I sure hope it works.

Today, the temperature wasn’t nearly as cold as yesterday, but it’s still cold. Living in Arizona will naturally make you a wimp to the cold. For all those who make fun of us sun worshippers, I challenge you to visit me in July. We’ll see who’s whining then. But until then, it is time to unpack the sweaters, pull out the jackets, crank up the heat, and fight over the flannel blankets. After all, we like to be warm.

Until next time…