After about six weeks of sub-standard performance, our wretched swamp cooler chose Friday the 13th to refuse to turn on at all. (For those of my readers unfamiliar with the joys of swamp coolers, first take a moment of silence and be thankful that you've never had to listen to anyone claim that they work as well as the real air conditioning being used in the entire rest of the civilized world. Then click here to learn about these contraptions.)

The cooler, as I mentioned, has not been performing well at all this summer, resulting in more than a few days in the recent very hot weeks when the coolest room in our house was 80 degrees by about 2 p.m., meaning that the rest of the house had all the appeal of an unventilated U-Haul truck. Dan heroically climbed up on the roof a couple of times to try to see if something wasn't working properly and even replaced a couple of parts that we thought might be the problem, but those adjustments yielded only minor improvements.

So it was almost a relief when, on Friday morning, the thing just wouldn't turn on. I called a local company with big vans and they sent over a very nice guy named Jerod who climbed up on our roof and climbed down about 10 minutes later to inform me, in a sincerely apologetic tone, that both our pump and our motor needed replacing. About two hours later, I wrote Jerod a very large check. I wasn't happy about that, since it's not like we aren't throwing money at baby gear purchases left and right these days. But it was 90 degrees in my house, and I really didn't want to spend the night in the frozen food aisle of Wal-Mart, which was looking like my other option. And now our swamp cooler works. I still hate it. But it works.

The one useful thing I think I may have gained from the recent weeks of overheating is a good introduction to the kind of mental discipline it would take to get through childbirth with only the aid of deep breathing and positive mental images. Sitting around trying to convince myself that it actually feels a little cooler in the house today, only, say, 85 degrees as opposed to yesterday's 88, is, as far as I can tell, the same sort of self-distraction I'll be striving for as I try to learn breathing exercises in our childbirth class for the next six weeks.

"No, these contractions don't really hurt! (Deep breath.) They're just waves carrying me toward my beautiful child's birth!"

Yeah. And I'll probably be using that deep breathing to yell for an epidural within about 10 minutes.