Wow. It's hot.

I'm jumping on the bandwagon and will spend part of this post talking about the heat. The heat is the news everywhere... or at least at Boston.com, which is where I get the vast majority of my news. Today I called Doug and told him that we could turn on the air conditioner tonight. I was baking, literally, in my office, and then I went outside to quickly run across the Christian Science plaza to get some corn for dinner and must have sweated off five pounds in the 10 minutes total that I was actually outside of the air conditioning. I am not a fan of air conditioning. I will do whatever is in my power to avoid turning it on at home, and hate the way my body has to adjust to the heat outside when I leave work after having spent eleven hours in it. But it's just so hot today, so I've caved. The first time we'll have had the air on all summer. Not too bad! The cats will be happy. Right now they're just lying around, as most cats are in this heat, trying to press their upside-down bodies into any corner they can to try to absorb any bit of coolness they might find there.

So I believe I forgot to discuss our vacuum cleaner episode in my last post. Saturday morning I woke up and jogged around the track at the high school. This was ambitious of me, especially since at 8:30 when I was out there it was already 80 degrees. But when I came back I decided to spend a little time watering the flowers and cleaning up the back steps area. I neglect the outside of the house so much. I feel very guilty about this. All spring and summer I've been meaning to clean up the back vestibule area, the little back porch where you enter the house. And so on Saturday, once the endorphins kicked in from my jog, I tidied and vacuumed this space. Because I was on a roll I then moved on to vacuum the rest of the house. Thoroughly vacuum. Vacuum the moldings, the doorways, the tops of the cabinets, the ceilings... you name it, I was vacuuming it. And then, suddenly, the vacuum stopped. I had turned it off to drag it to another room and put on a different attachment, and when I tried to turn it back on again there was nothing. Just silence. So I fiddled with the cord, Doug tried out several different plugs, we shook it, we jiggled the on/off button... nothing. Doug decided that it had overheated, but I decided that it was broken. I called the help line that was pasted to the front of the vacuum and was told to take it in to Mr. Sweeper, because the Dyson helpguy had no idea what could be wrong. So at about noon Doug and I trekked out into the heat to visit Mr. Sweeper, bracing ourselves for when he told us that we'd be swimming in a sea of cat fur because he wouldn't be able to have the vacuum back to us for a week or more. Come to find out, that preparation wasn't necessary.

We get to Mr. Sweeper and a nice young man comes out and asks us what the problem is. We tell him our vacuum cleaner is broken; it won't turn on. I begin to tell him that we have three cats and I was spending quite a bit of time vacuuming that morning and then suddenly it stopped working, and he immediately said that he was going to check for clogs. He takes the vacuum into the back room and not a minute later comes out with a handful of junk, showing us evidence of our problem. Sure enough, our vacuum was just clogged. In his hands were four pens, about a pound of cat hair, a few twisty-things from the top of milk containers, and enough cat food to feed the cats for a week. Well, not really, but there was a lot of stuff. "Vacuums don't suck up pens, guys," was what he said to us. Doug and I look at each other and each turn a deep shade of red. I mean, really. Clogged! Our vacuum was clogged! And we were both convinced that it was broken, Home Depot had sold us a lemon, and that we'd made a mistake going with the Animal. Anyway, once we apologized for being so stupid about our vacuum cleaner, we paid Mr. Sweeper $5 for his time and effort and took our vacuum home. I haven't used it since. I'm still a little embarrassed about the whole ordeal.

I am no longer embarrassed by our fish tank, though. Doug picked up a tiny three-gallon tank this weekend and now our cory cats are living in style in the living room. They love hiding in the pirate ship. If we don't forget to feed them, maybe these three hardy little buggers will be with us for a while longer.

And then this past weekend I had a reunion of sorts with some friends from high school. It was Jan's 30th birthday party at Jason's apartment in Newton. Thanks to Facebook I was made aware of the party and invited, and I went. It was fun! I hadn't seen Jan or Karen since our five-year high school reunion, which is something like six or seven years ago. Jason I saw a few years back when I was working at the O'Neill Library at BC, but Jaime and Krissi I haven't seen since... well, high school at least. It was fun to catch up. They met Doug, I met their other halves... I'm glad I saw them and I was glad to wish Jan a happy birthday. Yay thirty!

Now pardon me while I finish melting...