Hot Days and Big Steps

Hot, hot, hot. We've had 6+ days now with head indices hovering at or above 100. Calla and I have been living in the pool for the past week, and collapsing at night. It's also been a time of some interesting milestones and developments in the life of our nearly two-year-old. With that in mind, a random Calla update...


Thanks to a garage sale right across the street from us, Calla has a new kitchen in our basement. This has caused some degree of confusion when I've told her to find something in the kitchen, meaning the one with running water, and I find her down stairs, making pasta, soup and coffee. That's basically her culinary repertoire these days, and we tend to eat that with her for whatever meal she's making. Her babies also now drink coffee, and eat soup and pasta, which is surprising given their youth.


It's funny to remember that just a month ago, Calla was leery about getting in the water. She's now a fish with floaties: she can float on her stomach and kick, float on her back, and the biggest development this week was learning to blow bubbles. It's fun because she's much more self-sufficient in the pool now. Don't get me wrong -it's not as if we throw her in the deep end and then sip daquiris pool-side, but it does mean that we don't have to be as completely hands-on with her as we were last summer.

How hot is it? Well, our 40,000 gallon pool now registers 91 degrees. That's after we added water last night to cool it down from a sweltering 93. This sun thing is hot. You'd think somebody would figure out how to harness energy from it one of these days....

Talking and more talking... Calla's starting to figure out how to string together her impressive vocabulary into something resembling sentences. Objects still give her trouble, so sentences come out "Daddy apple eat," but she gets her point across. She's becoming more comfortable using pronouns, particularly "I," as in "I can do it" (we hear that a lot) or "I made it" or "I'll get it."

She's also telling stories more. She still talks about the "noisy trucks" that we saw chipping up wood from the storm over a month ago, but newly added to her story-telling series is: "Bug on window! Fly! Gone!" (Translation: she spotted a big bug on the window. It flew away, and it was gone. Got it?) From that story, she might transition to another window story: "Squirrels. Window. Mama. Bang, bang, bang. Go, go go!" (Translation: Squirrels on the bird-feeder. You figure out the rest.) Or she might tell the story about that one time when there was a bug on her head. What makes it fun is that each time she tells these "stories," they seem new and exciting to her. The truck was noisy! It hurt my ears! Loud truck!

It's supposed to be another scorcher here tomorrow. Hope you're finding ways to stay cool wherever you are.

A Happy Reunion

Yes, it's been over a month. It just kept getting to the point where the more time lapsed, the more there was to share, the harder it was to get motivated to post it all here. But might as well get started...

So, if the biggest event of May 2009 was the derecho/tornadic activity/macro-burst/inland hurricane that tore up Carbondale (and, as we've since learned, over half our roof, which will be replaced thanks to insurance once the roofers get to us in 6 months), then the second biggest event of May 2009 was the Disappearing Dog trick that Chloe pulled two weeks later.

Joe's folks and Jeri and Josh were visiting and Thursday morning, the men folk were going fishing. In all the activity of packing up, loading up fishing rods and coolers, Chloe snuck out of the house. She probably just though she'd figure out how to beg more food out of us, but somehow, no one noticed she was out and we all went back inside or to the lake. Clearly, she figured, she'd have to go elsewhere to beg some food. So, through the yard and over the neighbor's field of mud she went to go look pathetic and hungry somewhere else.

Since mid-morning through mid-afternoon is typically naptime for Chloe, we didn't notice she wasn't snoring inside until after we all returned from our lakeside picnic. After searching the house, and searching all her typical outside hiding spots, we were frantic. So we searched more. We called the neighbors we knew - they went out and searched. We called the police - no Chloe. We left a message for the vacationing animal control officer - no Chloe. By this time, the pound had closed and we wouldn't be able to reach them until noon on Friday. We went to bed thinking we'd seen the last of our snoring, begging, food-obsessed little pug dog.

Friday morning, I placed a "lost dog" ad in the paper. We made fliers and littered the neighborhood. And we waited. At 12:01 pm, Joe called the pound. Yes, someone had reported finding a lost black pug dog. No, she wasn't at the pound. But here's the number... which Joe immediately called. It was the local Chinese restaurant, which caused a bit of confusion on both ends of the phone. Eventually, Joe talked to the restaurant's owner who confirmed that yes, he had a hungry black pug dog in his car. "She eats a lot, right?" Right. That's our Chloe.

Ten minutes later, Joe was home with our Chloe. She had spent the night in that car since the restaurant owner (who lives behind us and a few houses down - so close!) had two other big dogs who did not play nicely with Chloe. She seemed happy to see us, although had likely been fed in Dalmatian proportions and perhaps was wistful that we didn't see fit to continue the trend.

All told, she'd been gone about 26 hours, and our house was too quiet during that time. She irritates me constantly, but take her away, and I became a tearful mess. It took me a whole 36 hours before I started yelling at her for snatching food from Calla - that's how much I missed her.

So, all in all, a happy ending. Oh, and one more detail - the Chinese restaurant's name? Happy Reunion. And so it was.