Let me start this story with a little background....we live in a 109 year-old farm house. Because this house is so old, there is no central heat or air conditioning. Now, in the winter it's fine because we have electric/baseboard heat, but the summer is a little bit tricky. We bought three really good window air conditioners and a dehumidifier that we use during the hot months. I never really knew what a dehumidifier was until I moved into this humid climate, but trust me, it's essential.
So, the tricky part is that we don't leave the window units in the windows year-round. We take them out during the cooler months when they are not needed. When it starts to get warm again, we put them back into the windows and do our best to seal the spaces around them so as to not let in any creatures, large or small.
These window units are quite handy, but they are not without their additional downfalls. So, lets get back to the story. Last night my husband and I were reading our son his bedtime story in our room. Our son was sweetly drinking his bottle and I was reading him one of the cutest little stories, Bats at the Beach. From out of nowhere we hear the loudest croak which unmistakably came from a frog. My husband and I looked at each other and I knew exactly what it was. I forgot to mention, our bedrooms are on the top level of the house which makes this story all that much freakier.
I told my husband, you better find that freakin' frog right now. We knew that it sounded close and that it was definitely in the bedroom. Here we were, looking all over our bedroom, for a damn frog. What I was doing was not using my actual hands to look through various items, I was kicking things around the room, totally prepared to have said frog jump up at me when I startled it.
I decided to leave my husband in the bedroom and I took our son to his room and put him to bed. My husband came downstairs with terrible news. He hadn't found the frog but was wondering if it was just outside the window of the air-conditioner and that possibly it wasn't actually in the house at all. He told me that he turned the air conditioner on and that he was going outside to see if the frog was on the side of the house.
He came back inside and told me that he did not have any luck finding it and that when he turned on the air conditioner it probably was startled and it hopped away. Well, we went back to watching TV downstairs. About an hour later we heard it. Now, this was a new sound, but we both looked at each other and knew exactly what this new sound was. What we heard was the air conditioner's motor chewing and grinding something furiously. My husband turns to me and said, that was the frog in the air conditioner's motor.
He runs back upstairs and I say, you don't need my help do you? I hear him banging and messing around upstairs for about five minutes. He comes lumbering down the stairs and says, get the keys to the shed and come outside with me. I get said keys and run outside into the dark, in front of my husband who's carrying this 50 pound air conditioner. I unlock the shed, fling the door open, reach around and turn on the light and run back into the house. He comes back inside a little while later and tells me that he can see the frog's leg in the motor, but nothing else is left. So, tonight when he gets home from work he's got another little project. He'll have to take the air conditioner apart, clean out the frog, bring the air conditioner back into the house, and set it up in our bedroom window.
I will never look at that air conditioner the same again. Actually, I will never look at a frog the same way again either.
