Air Conditioner Foam

I re-installed my window A/C unit the other day in eager anticipation of the warm weather to come. Trust me, it's easier than it sounds. The machine probably weighs a good fifty pounds and my room's three stories up, so positioning it half-hanging out of the window is pretty difficult. I'm sitting here right now hoping it doesn't just shake loose and plummet onto the head of some unsuspecting homeless person.

I don't know if you've ever had to deal with a window air conditioner before, but they always come packaged with these dark foam strips that you're supposed to use to seal off the cracks between the air conditioner and the window frame. Too bad it's damn near impossible to actually fit the foam into those tiny spaces while you're using all the strength in your fingers to keep the whole box from coming loose and killing someone. You're forced to go in after the fact and jam the foam into the cracks like a hapless sailor trying to plug his lifeboat with a wad of day-old chewing gum.

There's a small but surprisingly bright desk lamp sitting not far from the window where the air conditioner's installed, but thanks to my inability to skillfully wield those foam strips, it's turned from light source into a veritable mosquito magnet. I don't know where they're all coming from, but their corpses are slowly accumulating on top of my desk's otherwise insect-free surface.

Now that I think of it, there are a lot of things that work about as well as those foam strips. Iron-on T-shirt design paper, for instance. Or those do-it-yourself internet learning courses. My housemates can't even figure out how to use one of those 'fill the handle with dish soap' sponge contraptions. There are so many things out there that seem like such a good idea, that should be so easy to apply, that just look so much better on paper than they do in real life.