Hot Summer Days...

It was another quiet day in the office. I’d complain but I have to admit, it’s pretty nice. Tomorrow brings the start of the Office Olympics. Today, we decided to create a pre-Olympic event called “The Eating of the Ice-Cream.” There’s apparently a great ice-cream place in Cincinnati that even Oprah cites as her favourite ice-cream in the world. It’s called Graeters and I have to say, it is pretty fine ice-cream. Most of the people who sang its praises added the addendum: “It’s expensive though.”

I think I lived in L.A. for too long because a scoop of ice-cream- a generous scoop, I’ll add- was $3.25 and two scoops was $3.75. To me, this seems to be a reasonable price for a bowl of delicious ice-cream. It’s no more expensive than Cold Stone Creamery, Ben and Jerry’s or Haagan Daas. Also, it’s still cheaper than a large cup of fancy coffee at Starbucks.

It was a nice treat on a warm, quiet afternoon in the office. I’m starting to get used to the quiet. It’s nice to have freedom; all of the managers are at the conference. We’re policing ourselves which is rather a nice luxury.

I’m really quite enjoying not having half the staff in the office. The week is going quickly. Normally, I wouldn’t mind but next week, everything will return to normal. The conference attendees will return, full of information and stories and we’ll all have to listen to them. I’m sure that I won’t be the only one who will try to appear interested but wish I could just walk away because I honestly don’t care that much. It’s a sad thing but true. I’m sure that, as usual, there will be drunken evenings, stories about clients, inside jokes… the usual thing.

The rest of us will probably sit here with our own inside jokes. We’ll know who the best rubber-band archery shooter is or who can win a race by wheeling themselves in their chair down the hallway. It’s a trade-off but I can’t help but be glad I came down on this side of the trade.

Still, with the week going quickly and the weekend approaching, things are definitely looking up. The humidity faded a little this afternoon and it’s finally tolerable to be outside without feeling as though you’re going to burst into flames because you’re spontaneously combusting from the closeness of the air. It’s been horrible for the past week- damp, muggy, buggy and hot.

The puppies don’t seem to like the heat either. They run outside and within a few minutes, resurface in the living room, their tongues lolling out of their mouths to show how hot they are. They run out again and run back in again quickly. It’s a constant routine. They’ve taken to hunting the evil bunny that steals my vegetables and flowers. It ate all my swiss chard, my corn and now my lone sunflower. I see it running through the yard at breakneck speed every so often, usually chased by two little dachshund puppies. They’ll probably never catch it but they’re certainly trying.

Of course, they don’t just hunt bunnies outside. They dig holes. Rory has become a champion digger. She’s quite amusing to watch because she has a bit of a temper. If the ground doesn’t give way to her furious attempts to burrow, she starts yipping and ‘yelling’ at the dirt, clearly upset. She stomps and whines at it and then tries to bite it. She’s awfully cute and I don’t mind because it means there’s going to be less of a hole if the ground doesn’t give way.

Fortunately, she does seem to have given up digging up my plants which is nice. Instead, she digs near them instead, sometimes accidentally flattening them. If she isn’t the one to sit on them, Sookie is. She likes to watch her sister try to dig a hole. I now have several squished squash plants from Sookies’s observations.

I’m trying to train them to dig weeds which is a losing battle. We’ve had so much rain that the grass and weeds are growing way faster than I can keep up. The weeds are the worst. No matter how many I pull up, there’s ten ready to replace them. I’m trying but I’m losing. Some of them are quite pretty but others are mean little invasive things that try to choke my actual plants.

Nevertheless, summer officially starts in just a few days. It now means that I’ve made it through an entire year of seasons in my house since I moved in during summer of last year. The summer is the hardest because of the heat. It’s hard to not put the air conditioning on because otherwise, it’s just miserable. Winter was hard because of the snow but I didn’t mind the shoveling and I love snow so no complaints there. Autumn was nice with an unexpected Indian summer tucked in there. Then there was spring…that’s one of my favourite seasons and it felt like it barely got a chance to stand up between Winter and Summer before Summer kicked it out of the way and tried to take over. I’m hoping Spring wins back a little and can inflict some cooler days on the calendared days of summer but we’ll have to see.

In the meantime, I’ll take today’s lesser humidity and sunshiny day as a sign that Spring is still trying to win. Even though it’s hot, it could be way worse. Besides, today there was ice-cream to cool things down.

Ice-cream makes everything good. Having the office to ourselves makes it even better. Sometimes, I actually like my job.

Happy Wednesday!