I've already discussed the problem I had with my air conditioning.

I thought it was over, but nooooooooooooooooooo!

I've still been getting a lot of ice buildup. Not nearly as bad as before but still enough to annoy me, and enough to get the floor wet when it melted.

So today I went to Plan B: Cleaning the outside unit.

I removed the fan and sprayed the shit out of the thing with a hose. With all of the old grass and dirt gone it looked almost new. I reinstalled the fan and turned the A/C back on.

After about an hour, I saw that I had no ice at all. This was a good thing, and I once again figured that I'd fixed it.

But nooooooooooooooooooooo!

After another hour, I looked at the thermometer and saw that it was 87 degrees in the house. This just couldn't be. The A/C had been running nonstop for two hours.

At least the inside fan was running.

I went out to check the outside unit and saw, much to my dismay, that the fan blade had managed to neatly slice one of the wires. I'd failed to properly secure them, the fan cut the wire, and the outside unit had promptly blown a circuit breaker.

No wonder it was still hot in the house.

Desperate, apparently, to make a bad situation worse, I decided that I'd just repair the wire.

Found some electrical tape, a pair of wire strippers, and even a wire nut. I repaired the shit out of that wire.

But when I put the fan back in the wire bundle was still to close to the blades. There was this little plastic clippy thing that had broken, so there was nothing to keep the wires safely against the sides of the unit.

At about this time I got stung by a wasp.

Once I made sure that I wasn't going to die (which I'll admit would have been slightly worse), I tackled the problem of keeping the wires safe without the little plastic clippy thing. I found several garbage bag ties and used them to fasten the wires to whatever I could find inside the unit.

Better, but still not completely safe.

The very top section of wires just kept flopping out towards the fan blades, and there was nothing in that area to fasten them to. The slack that I was using so that I could remove the fan and get to the wires was also the slack that was causing all the trouble.

This is when I got my brilliant idea.

Not.

I found a very stiff piece of wire and decided that if I only had a small hole through the sheet metal at a certain point I could use the stiff wire to reach in through the hole and pull the bundle to safety and really secure the hell out of it.

I figured that I was home free.

But nooooooooooooooo!

What I did instead, despite very careful measuring and checking and double-checking, was drill a tiny hole in the damn A/C coil. Just nicked it, really.

Here's something I didn't know: Freon escaping from a tiny hole in a coil sounds exactly like a jet engine. Only louder.

Needless to say, my home repair skills (highly questionable by this point anyway) do not extend to repairing A/C coils and conjuring up new freon out of thin air. Ha ha. Freon. Thin air. Get it?

So now I get to burn a day of vacation tomorrow so the repair guys can come out to (a)tell me that I'm an idiot, and (b)repair or replace my outside coils.

So far the basement is still pretty cool. My cats have retreated there, and I may just join them tonight.