The car’s air conditioner stopped working last week; it turns out that the compressor needs to be replaced. Ouch. We’ll be deferring this repair, partly because we can’t really afford its thousand-dollar price tag at the moment, but mostly because, unlike other repairs and replacements (new tires in 2003, oxygen sensor last year), we can: we’ve been told that there’s no harm in simply letting the broken unit sit there. And I’ve done without car air conditioning before: neither of my parents had air conditioning in their cars before 1994 at the earliest, so I’m used to it. Doing without will not be a significant hardship — though I might change my mind after a long heat wave.

I’m not actually surprised or disappointed: air conditioners break down, and our car is eight years old (we’ve had it for three). It’s an occupational hazard of owning an older car.