Cross stitch pattern of the Space Invaders aliens in a bunch of psychedelic hexagons. Download the PDF here: Space Invaders Pattern

Grid Size: 66W x 66H
Design Area: 4.71″ x 4.71″ (66 x 66 stitches)
Colors: 7

My Patron, Ariana Gutierrez, is one of the many caretakers of The Ribbon, a historical artifact in an otherwise barren section of space. It’s a light years long banner started thousands of years ago and is still being added to even now. It’s a constant struggle for Ariana and their team to keep this priceless piece of art safe from debris, radiation, and thieves.

During the summer, my AC went out for a few weeks, and oh my god, it was an ordeal.

Here’s the story. So, the AC in my apartment died and I didn’t think much of it since it had happened before, but that was one of those edge cases where if you run the AC when it’s cold enough outside then the whole thing freezes up, and the time after that was because it needed more coolant, and truth be told, the thing was on it’s last legs anyway.

So the lady comes in to look at it and she says it’s the coolant again, no problem. The very next day, the machine was running for hours and not kicking out any cold air. So the lady comes back and does a whole bunch of tests and gave me the grave news that the AC was officially dead, rest in peace.

Not the worst. Our landlords have always been pretty good about repairs. They gave us a swamp cooler to tide us over. At this point I’m thinking, yeah this is going to be three days tops. I asked the office if they could set us up in a hotel for the weekend, but that wasn’t something they could do which is BS, this wasn’t my fault that the AC broke. They said they would get in touch with the repair company on Monday. I took this to mean that the repair would be carried out on Monday. As I would learn, that was not the case.

So my brother and I got a hotel room for the long weekend, thinking this would be a fun vacation and we could make the best of it. We went out to one of our reservoirs and rented a two person kayak and ate lunch on the water. It was awesome! The kayak was weird though. Apparently it was for fishing and had a space for a live well, but someone had put their foot through it and left sizable hole in the bottom. The kayak still floated since plastic boats these days are held up with black magic. It was nice to be able to dunk my feet in the water while rowing to cool down.

And all this knowing that the AC would be fixed when we got home. All was good.

Oh, sweet innocent me, out on that lake not knowing what was to come. We got back and the AC had not been replaced. Turns out it would be a full two more weeks before we could get it fixed and the landlord company still refused to set us up in a hotel for that long so we had to make due with a single wall mounted unit and fans.

I live in a desert so I kept cool by soaking a towel before bedtime and putting it at the foot of my bed so I could touch it with my feet as I slept. With the fan going, it worked like a makeshift evaporative cooler. By the time it was too dry to do anything, it was already early morning which is the coolest part of the night. I’m lucky I’m one of those people who can fall asleep with wet feet. I’m sure some of you shivered in terror when I mentioned it.

Oh, but it doesn’t stop there!

After the new unit got installed, we noticed a strange rattling sound when the AC was on. I thought maybe the new machine was just blowing harder than the old one and had dislodged something in the vent. I checked the filter and found nothing. Then I opened the metal door on the AC unit itself, took a look at all the complicated wires and junk, and just closed it again. Nope.

The same maintenance lady came by a day later, spent all of 5 minutes with it, and came back out holding a manual. Turns out the installation guy had left a literal book inside the machine and that’s what was making the noise.

I just… Do people still say “I can’t even” anymore? Because that’s how I felt about all of this.