Some Like It Hot. Just Not Us.

It has been hot here since Thursday. Really hot. Since it so rarely gets hot in Portland none of the apartments have air conditioning. The best thing you can do in these situations is to leave home and find things to do in either shaded areas, the car, or air conditioned buildings. None of that is a problem for Sergio and me. If we get hot we go. Eliot, on the other hand, isn't welcome to that many public places and is also covered in heavy black fur. He has been visibly miserable for days. Panting, moving from linoleum surface to rock surface to linoleum surface, and draining his iced water over and over again. The few times he has tried to sit with us on a hot couch or bed he immediately rolls onto his back in front of a fan and whines. Good times. Yesterday, Sergio and I took action to help him out. We gave him a terrible haircut to give him some relief around his head, rode around in the car with the air conditioning on full blast and stopped by PetSmart. He chose a toy all by himself despite our best efforts at getting him interested in cooler things. Yup, it's a carrot. It squeaks.

Sergio and I decided to take advantage of the weather and go for a bike ride at Sauvie Island. It has this really popular 12 mile loop that is almost perfectly flat the whole way. If you come to Portland in the spring or summer it is worth going around the loop. It is almost like stepping back in time. Very agricultural, one school, one community church, a general store. Most of the rest of the island is a wildlife preserve. It would have been just lovely if we hadn't gotten lost. Instead of doing a nice little 12 mile loop we managed to do a 24 mile out and back. This might not be a big deal for someone else, but for a girl who has used every excuse she could since starting grad school to let herself get mostly out of shape and is still coming off of a chest congestion cold...it was pretty darn hard. Now that I am no longer on the bike I think I can admit that it was mostly fun.