Over Compensate Much?

     Let's say you live in an apartment and they've decided to ban in-window air-conditioning units. So this limits you to a portable A/C if you want one. Now let's say you live on the first floor, and the view from all your windows in the apartment is the parking lot that has night time lights on all night, and you have a husband that works night shift so he sleeps during the day. You've tried putting a fan in the window to help cool the room down but alas, it reminds you of those dingy underground hideouts where you see shadows of large fan blades moving across your walls. Not to mention the occasional flash of headlights. During the day you have typical apartment noises, but since your window is feet from a main walkway to the garbage and mail, there is constantly people going by.

    In addition to all this nonsense, your apartment is so oddly laid out that getting air moving from one room to another is nearly impossible. You have 1 sliding glass door in the living room (everything faces the parking lot), and a window in each bedroom. That's it. The airflow is basically non-existent. 

    So what do you do? You overcompensate! I want to firstly say that these blackout "blinds" are a lifesaver, as they're covering the entire bedroom window, in addition to the A/C's vent hose because it glows like a beacon in the middle of the night. We bought a portable A/C that is also a heat pump so that we can keep it in the window all year round. It's possible that as much as we try our best to seal the window, air still leaks in and it might be fighting against that, but it's better than a heater register that doesn't understand when to shut the f*ck off when it gets to a set temperature. And actually, as I write this in October, and probably well into November, we'll still be running the A/C on cool. It's such a waste of energy because it's most definitely colder outside than it is inside, and if A/C's could use the "Fan" function by bringing in cold air from outside that would solve this issue but alas, there are no other options if we want the room dark and quiet. We keep the bedroom door closed at all times and have a draft thingie under the door, but the room temp still rises (even in the middle of the night) despite the fact it's cold outside and the window is (essentially) open.

    So onto the A/C itself. I bought a Whynter 14000 BTU A/C (12,000 SACC/DOE, which basically means "real world usage") with heat pump. As you can see from the pic above, our bedroom is not that massive, it's 169 square feet, but we do have 9 ft ceilings which is pretty rare for apartments. I bought this unit for several reasons (our old one kicked the bucket recently and it was a typical cheap, dual hose unit, 10,000 BTUs)

    1. The Hose-n-hose feature. This is available only in the highest end units, and
I was getting so tired of our janky set up with the two hoses stretched off to the side. The exhaust hose was covered with an insulator to help avoid heat getting back into the room before it's exhausted out, while the intake hose had been wrapped in layers of aluminum tape to stop the light bleed.

    2. The inverter. Again, only the highest end units have this feature, as I'm sure it's expensive to produce. It allows the A/C to ramp the speed of the compressor up and down as needed, instead of cycling on and off constantly, which not only saves energy, but also extends the life of the compressor. As a bonus to this, it is also extremely quiet. (As an example, we briefly bought a Hisense dual hose portable A/C 8000 BTU unit - spoiler alert, it was DOA - and it has an energy star sticker on it of $169 a year to run. In comparison, this unit, even though it is 14000 BTUs, had a sticker of just $65 a year to run.)

    

I know it doesn't look bad from this photo [left] but all the jankyness was hidden behind the curtain

As a side note, I am well aware of the A/C rule of sizing your unit to your space. It's annoying when everything is listed in square footage, and they don't take into account the height of your ceilings. When you convert sq ft to cubic feet, that 169 turns into 1521 feet, and the unit is rated for 600 sq feet. Plus, like I already mentioned above, the things I wanted for my portable A/C were only available in their highest end model. So I'm hoping the inverter saves the compressor so that it won't die early from short cycling.

    3. Evaporative Drainage. This is a big one. Our old unit had to be placed on a stool with a hose running to a bucket to allow water to constantly drain. Not only was it unsightly, but sometimes we'd forget about the bucket and we'd have water overflowing onto the carpet. There was more than once I had to take my hair dryer to it. This unit doesn't need to be drained in A/C or Dry modes (unless it's super humid, but we don't live in a super humid environment), but it *does* need to be drained in Heat mode. Although, it has some kind of pump where we can drain it from the middle plug (instead of the one on closest to the floor) just when it needs it. I'm not sure how much it holds or how often it will need to be done, but it sounds pretty simple and we won't need to have the bucket around all the time.

    This thing is so darned efficient that it cools the room in less than 10 minutes. Granted, it *is* colder outside than it is inside, so it's not fighting the heat, but I can't imagine it having a hard time. The only issue I feel we will run across is in the summer months, once it gets above 85 degrees, we like to open the bedroom door and add a fan so we can try to get that cold air to the rest of the apartment. But the way our bedroom/window is set up, its not at all facing the door like the old one was, and we can't make it due to the way the hose works. It was already hard enough, because as you can see from the schematics, there is a 90 degree bend outside of the door. So getting air out is already a chore, and the old 10,000 BTU unit worked it's butt off for not much payoff [our whole apartment is 1100 sq ft though!] We'll see if this 14000 BTU unit can do better. We're counting on you, Whynter!  

Time to Zip!

     For our one year wedding anniversary (June 2024), I decided that a Canada do-over was in order. The reason for this was because we had a $300 credit for Ziptrek Ecotours burning in my pocket that I needed to use. The plan was to be fairly quick about it. I had decided that if we drove up to Whistler and did the zip almost immediately, maybe I would miss the brain-cold-fuzzies (for context on this, please read Honeymoon Part 3). 

    In addition, there was no LTX this year (The timing wouldn't be right anyhow). So I didn't need to plan around that at all. We were going to completely avoid downtown Vancouver this time, which was definitely okay by Patrick since he's the one driving. I found a hotel in North Vancouver on the bay (Ocean Promenade Hotel) that looked really nice that we would stay in on Day 1, and then stay at a hotel in Whistler proper on Day 2 (Evolution Whistler). Whistler in the summer, not on a Saturday night, is actually quite cheap and definitely worth it.

    Once we reached Canada, we had one stop to make before checking into our hotel on the bay. The farmhouse on Smallville. Yeah, that's right. Smallville was filmed in Canada and they used a house right on the Canadian border with Washington for some outdoor shots, I guess. A farm next door was having a
wedding, so we sneakily used their parking and walked to the house. Obviously we didn't bother them. There was an equestrian trail next to the house where I
got a couple of shots of the windmill and where they had the "Kent Farm" sign. After that, we checked into our hotel. The weather was going to be pretty great so we were lucky. All the rooms at this hotel were pretty sweet and I loved ours. Every room had a large balcony with a view of the bay, right on the downtown street where you can walk to restaurants and such. It reminded me a lot of Alki Beach in Seattle. 

    We walked to a long boardwalk that lead into the bay, and then walked to dinner from there. We watched the sunset also, which was quite nice. The weather overnight was going to be partly cloudy, but because the beach was facing south, I wanted to give myself a chance to take photos of the milky way. Turns out it was much too bright for something like that, which was unfortunate. 

    Our reservation for the zipline wasn't until 12:30pm, so we lazily made our way up to Whistler. I was not going to have a repeat of last year where I booked ourselves like crazy and we had to rush from place to place and feel stressed. No stress allowed this time!

    We were too early to check into our hotel, so we parked at Whistler Village and walked around until it was time to check in. Patrick and I were both nervous. Neither one of us had ziplined in 10-15 years, and my zipline was babyish compared to what we were doing this time. You see, when I went to book our times, the credit didn't match up with the pricing. If I bought the Bear line, which is what we had originally booked last year (and was the "beginner" course), we would have $20 left over that we couldn't use. So I booked the Eagle course, for the "people who knew what this was all about", for $20 extra instead. We basically drove half way up Blackcomb mountain to start, and zipped our way back down to Whistler Village. Patrick hates heights, but from what he had told me about zipping in Mexico, where you have to break yourself by hand (??!!), this was going to be much better. It was still very hard to take that first step off of each platform, and even by the end I never got 100% used to it. Was it worth it? Sure. Would I ever do it again? No thank you. I have the Gopro video so that's good enough for me, thanks! lol

    We immediately went to check into our hotel after, and I specially chose this place for one reason: It had a dry sauna. That's why I loved Scandinave Spa so much. That smell of cedar while sitting in a hot, dry room was heaven. And the hotel was freaking amazing. It had a split bedroom and living room thing with a gas fireplace in the center. A massive bathroom with the biggest soaking tub I had ever seen, a really nice kitchen, and it was backed up to a forest with a balcony and a view of a mountain. I'd say the only downside was that these hotels were built for winter activities, so it had features like a heated floor (which was definitely not needed right now- it was around 78 degrees outside), but that also meant the minisplit that cooled the room only went down to 65, which wasn't nearly cold enough for sleeping. (And unfortunately, the fireplace kicked out some heat too so I couldn't even leave it on! We had to leave the balcony door open most of the night, which was certainly a risk as we were backed up to a forest, but I couldn't sleep otherwise.) I immediately jumped into the bath and soaked for a good 30 minutes and Patrick took a nap before we headed back to Whistler Village for dinner. We had made reservations at a fairly fancy Italian restaurant for our anniversary dinner called Quattro. My dinner was delicious but Patrick absolutely loved his spicy pasta. After dinner we headed back to the hotel to check out the hot tub and sauna as the sun set before heading to bed.

I have one weird story to tell and I don't think I can adequately describe what happened to us. So our car was in an underground parking garage with a gated entrance. Patrick had parked our car around a corner in the garage when we checked in. And when we came back to drive to our dinner reservation, our car was nowhere to be found. I began to panic, wondering if it had somehow been stolen, which would have been nearly impossible - it was a gated garage! We walked in, walked out, went back to the lobby, walked back out to the gate... nothing was making sense. We had no one to ask because Evolution didn't have a front desk (their sister hotel had checked us in). Turns out, the garage had two identical levels, and when we had used the elevator to go to like, P1, it was the lower level. We had parked on the "lobby level" of the garage, I guess. It was surreal, though. We thought we had entered an alternate dimension. And the time we wasted trying to figure it out almost made us late for our reservation!

We had a decision to make today: we needed to either leave early to avoid afternoon traffic on south I-5 (and in Vancouver as well), or leave late to hopefully skip all of the backup. In the end, we decided to leave late so we could spend more time in Whistler being lazy. We grabbed an easy breakfast at a nearby coffee house and took it back to our balcony to enjoy it before we checked out. We spent much of the morning shopping at Whistler Village before we headed back towards home. We caught the very tail end of Vancouver traffic, but completely skipped south I-5 traffic and made it home by 10pm. All in all, a very nice and relaxing anniversary. 

San Diego Day 3

     Well, my sleep was definitely piss-poor due to my injury so I had decided to make an appointment with a local urgent care to get checked out. Was able to get in and out quickly when they opened. They barely did any kind of exam, told me to RICE, gave me a neoprene knee brace and a Toradol (like advil only a bit stronger) shot. Okay well, GG I guess?

    After that, we went to breakfast at Breakfast Republic, and that was some of the yummiest food I'd had in awhile. I ordered the Oreo Pancakes and they did not disappoint. Patrick had ordered the banana split pancakes with ice cream and he really liked those as well. Dessert for breakfast, just my kind of place! After breakfast I wanted to find a gift shop that sold comfy hoodies (I'd ran into a few before and almost bought one but finally decided I really wanted one), so we visited Old Town. It was like stepping into an old Western but was Mexican inspired with gift shops selling ponchos and sugar skulls. I found a super soft hoodie that I could snuggle up in, but we didn't stay long because we needed to make our way to Patrick's old stomping grounds - El Cajon. We drove around and he showed me some old places he used to frequent. We also stopped at a local mall so that he could find a new jersey and hat for the Padres.

    His friend Ruth had rented out a space at an RV park she worked at and was throwing a get together starting at 2, so before we left to go back to San Diego for that, we stopped by one of Patrick's favorite Mexican restaurants call Victoria's. I had a trio of street tacos and they were delicious. And Patrick was right about the best Carne Asada burritos being in San Diego - theirs were very tasty. 

    Then it was time to finally meet the fam. Unfortunately my face was scratched up after the incident and I had quite a limp - a memorable first impression for sure. I really didn't interact with them much at all; Ruth had her family with her, and Josh had brought his wife and kids as well, so I kind of just... didn't talk much. I feel bad about it, because generally when I'm uncomfortable I don't participate in any conversations; I even prefer not to sit with others in order to make my quietness less awkward, and I don't accept any accommodations like food or drink nor do I ever ask for any, even if I'm hungry or thirsty. I feel like I'm imposing. I prefer to make myself invisible - it's just easier for me. But I probably came off as standoffish or rude. Anyway, they were all very nice and accommodating. They tried to make me feel welcome even though I didn't really join in. It's definitely nothing on them.     

    We played 1975 trivia, ate pizza and tons of candy, the kids went swimming in the pool while Patrick chatted with his friends. There was cake, and a very moving speech by Ruth about how close they were and how they would always be friends and it really made me wish I had friends like Ruth and Josh.

    We left right after cake because we needed to rush to Sunset Cliffs and catch the sunset. Well, as best as we could. Despite our best efforts the whole trip, the clouds refused to let up during the evening and I never caught a good sunset. The cliffs were gorgeous though, I could just imagine how they would look when the golden hue of a spectacular sunset would light them up. I'll probably have to add it to my spite list!

    We had an early flight to catch but we had to make one more stop tonight; we drove out of our way to find the closest In-N-Out for a late dinner. He promised me it would be better than Oregon (our closest location, which has lines 1+ hour long constantly) because In-N-Out was everywhere so it should be fine. Yeah, no. It was packed, the drive thru line took up the entire parking area, and we waited at least 30 minutes for our food. Sigh.

    After that, it was bedtime and our flight back home was uneventful. Despite my injury and lack of good sunsets, I had a good time. I would definitely like to return some day.