Sunday, June 21, 2015

Keeping Cool

Happy Caturday 01102015

 First day of summer today and it was quite warm. Fortunately, our house is in the cool-zone of Los Angeles. Generally we’re about 10 – 15 degrees cooler in the summer than the areas east or west of us. That helps a lot since we don’t have air-conditioning.

Quint and Hedge start the day in the sunny windows, basking and bird-watching. As soon as it starts to warm up, though, they seek the dark spots and the places where the air moves around a bit. They stretch out when it’s hot and curl up when it’s cold, but some days it’s just so hot in the afternoon that they try to hide from the heat under the bed or in a closet. Or they stretch out on the floor. The basement is always cooler than the upper part of the house and I suppose the floor stays a little cooler because of that.

In the evenings, we run several fans to move cool air through the house and we all enjoy that. I try to get a flow going from one end of the house to the other, so we pull air in on one side and push it out on the other. Sometimes that actually works. The kitties will lie down in the airflow enjoying the relief from the hot afternoon.

In reality, though, it never gets too terribly hot in our house and we nearly always get some relief in the evenings. I’m sure the kitties would love to able to unzip their fur coats on those really hot days, but then they’d need those all-important thumbs and fur with zippers. They are shedding a little more right now, thinning out the fur for the coming summer months. I brush them both every day, no matter the season, but it’s more important now than ever to help them stay comfortable for California’s other season.

We only have the two seasons here. Summer and Not-Summer. It’s much cooler in the Not-Summer months and some years it rains. It’s really only unbearably hot for about two weeks at the beginning of September. The rest of the year it’s either warm or cool. We don’t have weather here, only climate. Lucky for us, we live in a zone where the climate is quite moderate – easy on both humans and cats, except for those two weeks in September when temperatures are over 100. None of us enjoy that. We’re used to it, though, and we know what to expect and we know that it only lasts a couple of weeks. Between now and then we’ll keep the fans going and have cool cats and people most of the time.

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