Wednesday, July 29, 2009

Be the Cat


Miss Molly Brown sez: HOTTTTT!
Note that Molly is also maximizing surface area for optimal cooling. (One could argue that lying on a rug wouldn't help with this..but then again, one doesn't argue with cats.) Why is Molly (that's Miss Brown to you) doing this?

Because it IS hot. 103 on its way to 106 hot. Record-setting hot.

Last night, with all the scorchiness, my sweetheart and I couldn't face any form of cookery. So we--very cleverly, we thought--headed to a local pub for dinner. Where the waitress informed us that the wait for our food would be at least an hour, maybe more. Because it turned out everybody ELSE in the neighborhood had already decided the same thing and gotten there before us.

Originalityfail.

Before all of you who live in searing locales start snickering in your iced tea, consider this: you most likely have air conditioning. Most of us in Portland don't, because fifty-one weeks out of the year, we don't need it. Besides, most of us in the city live in old houses, and when you live in an old house (and I'm talking old like 1906, not 1972) installing air conditioning ranks pretty much dead last on the priority list. (At the top is "find out why the hot water in the upstairs bathtub comes out of the wall instead of the faucet," followed by two dozen items ranked in order of how loud we screeched "Oh, my GOD" when we discovered them. We old-house owners prefer to think of these things as "character." Until we scrape together enough money to fix them, after which we refer to them as "that disaster the previous owners thought was such a brilliant idea which could've electrocuted us in our sleep.")

Heat waves in Portland are kind of like snow in Portland. We get a week of each every year, more or less, and it rocks Portland's world.

Be the cat, Portland. Maximize cooling. And buck up--after all, it's bound to rain again soon.*


*weeps quietly at the thought

6 comments:

Lisa Nowak said...

I have some photos of my cat from yesterday that look just like that. Cats are like furry thermometers. You can tell how hot it is by how long they are.

Melissa Amateis said...

Ack. I hate heat. Thus, I tend to become a recluse in the summer. But July was NOT hot at all - which is very, very unusual in Nebraska.

However, we are going to pay for it in August - it's already boiling outside.

Christine Fletcher said...

Lisa--I love the idea of cats as thermometers, that's hilarious...and so true! (When it's cold, they get very very short the tighter they curl up).

Melissa, I remember reading on your blog that you hate the heat. I think you'd like Portland...this kind of weather is really short-lived here. In fact, we're back to mid-80s and rain showers this week. :(

Sally Nemeth said...

Here's what kind of masochist I am - we have no A/C in our house in LA. And I hate the heat. So...why not A/C. Old house & truthfully, in LA, it's only a couple weeks out of the year you need A/C because it cools off at night. The pets spend summer belly up on the floor, though, in prime "roadkill" position.

Christine Fletcher said...

Sally, we cool off at night, too-- usually by at least 30 degrees. And no humidity. Which is why, after living in Tennessee for 3 years, we kind of roll our eyes at the native Oregonians who claim to be dying from heat. Try 100 degrees and 100% humidity! ;)

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