My dad was a real manly, macho type of dude. He lived on a ranch, similar to the one where he had been raised, and he did everything himself. He had a huge family, mostly to help out with chores, and we grew food, hunted, fished, maintained our own freshwater well, and managed our own farm equipment. If something broke, we had two options — fix it ourselves, or learn how to survive without it, because calling a repair tech was out of the question. Our farm house was too old to have air conditioning, because when it was built AC did not even exist. There is a huge furnace down in the basement, along with a water boiler, so the winters were never a problem, but the summers were rough. The only form of cooling we had was a very old and decrepit box-style air conditioner that we kept in storage for most of the year. When the summer heat settled in, my dad would drag the old air conditioner out of the barn and install it in the window of the living room. After dinner, for an hour or two but no longer, we would turn on the AC and sit together enjoying the brief respite from the heat and humidity. That was the only real break we got, and the day that machine stopped cooling was a sad day indeed. My dad told my siblings and I that if we wanted it to work again, we needed to fix the air conditioner ourselves, because there wasn’t money to fix it.