W.T.F.

Eli is back to work today, so I was at the house to take care of things.  When I arrived, the temp inside the house was 30C (86F).  I opened up the front door as well as one of the south-facing windows and a north-facing window.  It had started off cloudy today so with no sun beating through the window and a nice, cool breeze coming in, the living room was fairly comfortable.  It dropped to around 27C as I was sitting there waiting for the ventilation repair guy to show up.

He ambled up the sidewalk around 7:55 a.m.  Our appointment was for 8 a.m. so this was a promising sign.

I showed him to the utility room, where there are two large cylinders.  We thought that one of them was the heat pump.  Nope!  He figured it was probably in the attic, so he went back out to get a ladder.

He pulled himself up into the attic.  I heard him walk across the floor and flip a switch off and on.  The extractor vent in the bathroom had been active; it shut off and eventually came back on again.  He put a piece of toilet paper over the round vent to ensure it was pulling air out.

There are small boxes on the wall in each room.  I assumed they were some kind of air handling system. He got up on the kitchen counter and was messing with one.

His verdict?  The system is working just fine, and the reason it's so hot in the house is because it's so hot and sunny outside.

What the actual fuck?

While it's true that Ireland is typically not this hot, there ARE times when the weather gets stupid like this, and you're telling me you've installed a system that doesn't actually do much to move hot air to the outside?

After I left, I went down the row of houses that looked like they had occupants and knocked on the door.  I didn't want to bother folks, but I wanted to ask what their house had been like over the stifling weekend.  If their experience were like ours, we'll know our system is "working" and that's just the way it is.

No one answered my summoning.  Everyone was out, didn't hear me, or didn't feel like opening the door to a stranger.  The only response I got was from the cute Sphynx cat in the house right next to ours.  S/he was lying in a cat bed on the windowsill and looked out at me, then came to look out the narrow window in the door.

I had planned to stop at Express on the way back to the apartment to pick up a few things.  Express is one tram stop down from the new house, and it's one tram stop further to the apartment.  However, Eli had asked if I could go instead of Leopardstown and pick up some prescriptions for him.  There's a Dunne's grocery store in the same mall, so I'd be able to accomplish both tasks at once.

I had been carrying around some bird-safe shelled peanuts for the crows and as I stepped off the platform at Leopardstown, I saw a handful of crows in a grassy area near the parking lot.  I tossed one handful of peanuts toward them and suddenly, there were about 30 crows descending on the space.  I threw another handful, and the gulls started showing up.

I got Eli's medications, completed my shopping, and headed back to the LUAS platform to await a tram back to the apartment.  I'd gotten about halfway to the platform when the tram going in the right direction for my purposes was just pulling out.  But it's a coolish day (outside, anyway) with a decent breeze, and the next tram was due in 10 minutes, so that was fine.

The tram said it was due in 6 minutes....still said 6 minutes....still said 6 minutes....then it said 11 minutes....

And then - get this - a message scrolled across the electronic schedule screen that there was no tram service between Sandyford and Bride's Glen because of an issue.  And Leopardstown is between Sandyford and Bride's Glen.  And I JUST MISSED the last tram that would've taken me to Bride's Glen.  [Sidenote:  The fact that I had missed this last tram by about 30 seconds just suddenly dawned on me while I was writing this.  SON OF A BITCH!]

Again, and I cannot say this vehemently enough:   What the actual fuck?  As Eli said WHY DOES IRELAND SUDDENLY HATE US??!

I texted Eli the latest development while also checking alternative ways home, hoping the ice cream bars I bought weren't melting into oblivion by this point.  The bus routes weren't optimal, so Eli suggested getting a taxi home.

Here I go, pulling up the Uber app again.  I was able to reserve a driver named Ervin in a red Prius who was scheduled to be there in about 7 minutes.  The pick-up location was showing the parking lot of the shopping centre; as I was standing at the LUAS stop, I sent him a message, letting him know I wasn't in the parking lot, I was at the LUAS stop.

A few minutes later, I see a red Prius with a taxi sign....and he goes right past me and turns on the road that will take him to the shopping centre parking lot.  Since I wasn't sure if he saw my message, I sent another message and said I was on my way to meet him in the parking lot.

So I hustled over and saw a red Prius with the taxi sign starting to pull out of a space, and I'm like "Please don't leave without me!"  But it swung toward me, and I gratefully piled into the backseat.

I apologized if I had misunderstood the meeting point.  He said he had seen me standing near the street by the LUAS stop, but he actually needed to off-load someone at the shopping centre first.  I think he was probably going to come back for me, but this precluded any of that.

I told him he was a life saver and that the LUAS was down.  He said the gal he'd just delivered had mentioned it wasn't working.  He said the LUAS is great but when it goes down, that's a problem, and I heartily agreed.

After an uneventful trip, he pulled up next to the apartment building.  I told him again he was a lifesaver and that I wished him all of the blessings.  He said he hoped I had a great day.

Eli is working from the apartment today.  I had asked him yesterday if he'd be able to do this just in case something went sideways today - it would've been much easier for him to ride a few minutes to the new house (if he were needed there) than to have returned from his office which is around 40 minutes away.

He wasn't sure if the lady or the tiger were going to walk through the door.  🙂  With all of the stress of the weekend and then this weird transportation glitch this morning, he thought I might be all kinds of bent out of shape.  But honestly, the whole thing nearly made me laugh.  I'm not dumb enough to ask "What next?" because that's just a bad idea.  I just kinda shrugged because this is par for the course lately.

Our current plan is for me and the cats to stay at the apartment for the time being.  Eli will go back to the house after work tonight, get it opened up to see if that will help cool it off.  I think he's also going to see if he can catch any of the neighbors to ask about the temp in their homes.  The day has been pleasant enough, and cloudy at times, but it's a killer when the sun comes out and started pounding through the windows.

I ordered some fans (it was extremely difficult to find fans even online - or find fans that wouldn't take two weeks to arrive).  They're supposed to arrive in a couple of days, but we'll see if that actually happens.

We're also going to write to the management company to ask what types of interventions we'd be allowed to do - what types of heat-blockers we can add to the windows and whatnot.  Because I think if we can reflect the heat away from the inside of the house and have some fans running, we might be fine.