“Daddy, I’m too hot!”
It's 10:30, Gillian has been in bed for almost two hours and she's awake complaining about the heat. We'd been out all day and so I figured the AC was just catching up and it'd be cool fairly soon. She and Aidan were lying in bed with no sheets or blankets, sweltering. I fell asleep a little while later with visions of having to pay 5k for a new AC/heating unit dancing in my head. Not the stuff dreams are made of.
Fast forward to 1am. Fae wakes me up by fruitlessly searching for the remote because she can't sleep either and I'm sweating. WTF? I go downstairs to check the temp and it says 71, and it's quite comfortable downstairs. I get a drink and head back upstairs and with each step, I'm feeling a degree of heat go up. Okay, what the hell? I feel the register that's right near the stairs, very little coming out. I feel the one downstairs right at the bottom, plenty.
Great, the AC isn't pushing out enough to get upstairs. New AC....wait a sec.
If your unit is set up anything like mine, we have these big long rectangular boxes in the attic with plastic 'sleeves' coming out of the sides to bring the ac/heat to the bedroom registers. Problem is, you're not supposed to pile anything on top of the boxes, even tho they're really sturdy. Oops.
I thought about that the other day, so I pull out the ladder, climb up, push the trapdoor up, and I'm blasted by cold air. Ah, the attic is nice and chilly. Shit! The box nearest me is more of a rhombus than a box and where the segments come together the tape has separated and cold air is blasting out. DUCT TAPE TO THE RESCUE!!! YAY!!! I taped the hell out of it after pushing it back into the shape it's supposed to be in. Went down, felt the registers in the kids room. Hmm, definitely more, but still not much.
Scramble back up the ladder, yeah, it's about 1:40am at this point, and I took a better look. The one end had some stuff on it - just a box, some books, a tv, and like 3 sleds - not much 
Moved all of that to a chorus of Fae saying "You okay" and "What are you doing" and snores. Moved it all out of the way and reached behind the end.
There was a hole the size of a football there the end had collapsed and air was rushing out of it. To the point that there was condensation on the end! Pushed everything back into place, twisted myself up like a pretzel so I could reach, and used about half the roll of duct tape. Big roll too 
Felt all around, didn't feel any cold air. Checked the sleeves, they're all cool, in fact one is kind of inflated so I take that as a good sign.
I climbed down and went to check the registers - Aidan's rolled up in his sheets and blankets shivering. Felt the register, full blast baby, OH YEAH!!!!
So I put the AC to 70 instead of 65, turned the fans on 'ON' instead of auto so they'd cycle the air around and crashed for 4 hours before waking up to go to work.
What a pain in the ass, but you know what? I FIXED IT! ME! I figured out the problem and did something about it. Forgetting of course that I'm the idiot that put all that stuff on the end and made the hole, but at least I fixed it Sitting in my nice comfortable living room right now YAY ME!
The big question is, what is my electric bill going to look like this month now that ac/heat isn't blasting out into my attic. Oye kinda looking forward to seeing it.