We spent about 5 weeks, I guess, living in a 9×11 room with two dogs and one slightly undersized air conditioner. We had a blanket over the doorway so we wouldn’t lose so much air every time we had to open the door; it was like walking into the world’s largest hairdryer. Getting out of the shower was awful, standing there drying and drying and drying until you realized that you were now sweating, not shower-wet. We went out to eat or got takeout nearly every night, or just didn’t bother eating. Toward the end, when it was 105 every. single. day, even the window unit couldn’t keep it below 78 in there; the last two nights before the heat broke were really gross.
On the other hand, we were fine. These are the problems of the blessed. I got around to setting up BeyondTV on one of our desktop computers, and I need to do some tweaking but it’s really nice. I got some reading done. B was gone to a conference one week and I planned our vacation while he was gone (I’m the detail person on things like that). One evening it rained, bucketing down for about 45 minutes, and we stood on the porch with beers and toasted it and watched the whole thing until it was just drizzling. Then we went to our friends’ house about 8 miles away, and they were bone dry and got no rain all night. That’s the kind of summer it’s been.
In other news, we have not stolen the neighbor’s dog, exactly. She has a spot in the fence that she can get through to go back and forth, and she goes over there several times a day to see if anybody gives a shit about her yet, and then she comes back when nobody does. There’s been stuff afoot over there in the past several weeks (or, an escalation of stuff, because there’s always been some shadiness going on), and the people who took care of her don’t appear to be living there anymore, only visiting briefly every weekend, and the person who is sleeping there is the one I’ve seen threaten the dog with a board because she was scratching to come inside. You would have to be an idiot to not know where the dog is; he is no longer even bothering with the charade of putting out a bed and dumping a bag of dog food on the patio. I hate to close the hole in the fence, because I don’t want to officially take a dog away from little kids, but I am pretty sure that had already happened and that it would be safer to block off her path back. I will reassess if I see the children come home, but honestly I think I’m just pre-empting the part where he moves out in the middle of the night and abandons her in the yard either with or without the gate to the street open.
And we like her. She’s calming down and learning not to jump on us, and to sit, and to not steal containers of barbecue off the kitchen counter, I hope. She’s a beagle whippet (lurcher is the word I wanted, though she is just the right size for a whippet), and I find her greyhoundiness very charming. We are relatively sure the children called her Scrappy, and we’ve been trying to call her Scrappy-Sophie to transition her to a less horrible name. She’s getting along really well in the pack, with the dogs and with us, and I wouldn’t hate it if we kept her for good. I do really hate the situation and it makes me kind of tense, so I’m trying to stay on the side of not doing anything technically unethical, but I will say I sleep a lot better at night, even with her sleeping on my knees, than I did when we were giving her food and a blanket and shutting her outside.