Fried Gecko

Sounds tasty, huh? Well, rest assured that we were not eating fried gecko around here. We were, however, experiencing extremely warm conditions that geckos seem to like. That wouldn't have been a problem, except the warm temperatures were inside our apartment while the AC was blowing.

Early Monday morning - about 4am when Ian woke up - I noticed the apartment seemed a bit warm, but didn't think too much about it. We often keep the AC close to 80 overnight and if the humidity rises, it can start to feel warm. We just knock down the temp a few degrees and are good to go. I was too tired to do that so early in the morning though, so I fell right back asleep and didn't think about it until we were up and going at 7am. We'd actually been up for a little while at that point and I realized I hadn't turned down the AC yet. So, I pushed the little bar over a few notches and waited for cool air.

The cool air was being awfully shy, so I pushed the bar over a bit more. It didn't take long for me to realize we weren't going to be getting any cool air. The apartment office didn't open until 9am, so Ian and I went outside for a walk where it was just as stuffy and humid (although overcast). Ian was happy to be outside though. As soon as the office opened, we called to let them know. Our awesome maintenance guy got right on the problem (this place has the best staff we have ever seen at any apartment complex!!) and even waited until nap time was over to get started.

It wasn't long before he found the problem.

Yup. Fried gecko. Apparently that little guy used to be much bigger (that's a zoomed in picture of him on an outdoor canvas camp chair). He somehow got in the ac unit and tangled with the wiring, which dehydrated him and shorted out the unit. Being the great maintenance guy that he is, Carlos got right on it and got us a new unit in that day.

Ian had a blast! He got to go in and out of the apartment all day. We don't normally let him keep the back door open because we lose the wonderful air conditioning, but it didn't matter yesterday!

He went in and out for hours! In fact, he wore himself out so much that he slept til 9am today. I'm thinking I ought to let him do that more often.

Our upstairs neighbor, who is also fantastic (how did we get so lucky?!), looked over his balcony and saw poor Carlos sweating in the heat changing out our AC unit. So he brought down some lemonade. After a little while, we noticed the clouds gathering and he was nice enough to go back upstairs and check on the weather to make sure we wouldn't get rained out during all of this. He then came back down with lemonade for all of us. What a great neighbor!

It wasn't long before Carlos had the new AC unit in and running perfectly. We feel badly for the poor gecko - he gave his life for our new unit! Thanks to Carlos and Naybah C for making the afternoon go so quickly and the non-AC time so much more bearable!