Thanks for closing the oven door!

Dragon Mood? -- scratching her dragon head and scales

Wow! Where has the week gone?

Like so many other bloggers I've been reading, S and I are slowly emerging from the state of air-conditioned seige we've been in for the past eight days. Record temperatures and unbearable humidity have kept me in the house like a summer BLIZZARD. I've got cabin fever! It was so hot and humid that two or three nights, at 10 p.m., after sticking my head out the back door, I told Cisco, "Sorry, girl -- we're not going out tonight." On the other hot nights when we did venture out, we weren't even a block from home when she was panting hard and I was dragging along.

The heat and humidity felt downright UN-natural. Like Mother Nature left open a 500-degree oven door AND a steam bath door. The stifling feeling was horrible. How do people in Florida and Louisiana stand it? And it really did feel unnatural for us cool-air folks in Michigan.

I can't tell you how good it felt last night to OPEN THE WINDOWS, let in the fresh, cool air and fall asleep listening to the windchimes moving in the breeze. Thank you, God, for cool air, breezes and restful sleep.

Restful sleep until 3 a.m. anyway. Then I was awakened. The dog heard or sniffed something outdoors, jumped at an open window and I heard this crash of glass. I jumped out of bed and found the drinking glass that I thought had broken still intact. Meanwhile, Cisco is madly pacing back and forth, whining to be let out, so I accompanied her outside, at which point she immediately charged at the sideyard fence. I got this faint whiff of ... skunk ... and immediately whisked the dog BACK inside the house. Broken glass (yet to be found) is bad enough; I didn't want to have to deal with an odoriferous dog too.

Now my brain is on avoid-the-skunk alert. I used the bathroom, drank a short glass of milk, took an herbal Valerian, got back in bed and lay there. And lay there. Wide awake. The brain gerbils were going a 100 mph on the mind-treadmill. STOP that! Go to sleep!

At four a.m., I got up, started laundry, tidyed up some in the kitchen, and sat down in our one remaining living-room plastic Adirondack chair to play a mindless little iPAQ game, hoping that would get me sleepy. It did ... finally at 5:30 a.m. I heard S's alarm go off around six, but I had enough of The Sandman's sleep in my eyes, ignored it and continued to slide off into sweet sleep.

I woke up at nine ... should an unemployed person tell you that? It felt GOOD to get back some of the sleep stolen from me in the middle of the night. Ahhhh, another day!

And .... what about the broken glass? Well, stupid with sleep, I never even thought to worry about the dog STEPPING on glass shards. I found the remnants of a large votive candle that got knocked off of a window sill and fell harmlessly UNDER an end table where the dog couldn't reach. Thank you, God, for protecting Cisco's paws when I couldn't.