It's, um, hot.

When we returned from our CA vacation, the house was about 85 degrees. Holy moly! And it only got hotter here in Hillsboro, so the little AC unit that could has been running nonstop...and broke down yesterday. It's, um, kinda hard to cool down a two-story house with no air conditioning when it's 110 degrees outside, as it was yesterday. We're roasting! Luckily we have some fans, which ran all night in the bedrooms to make it bearable for us to sleep. Alton took a cool bath and had the biggest standing fan of all in his bedroom, which seemed to arrive at a livable, albeit warm, temperature for him. We had the ceiling fan and a smaller tabletop fan in our room and were roasting. A cold shower seemed to do the trick for a little while, but didn't cool things down quickly enough. I checked a thermometer, which said it was 91 degrees in the room. Holy smokes! I know people who would like their steaks cooked at that temp. Andy was passed out, of course, since he could sleep standing up (and has), while talking, or knee-deep in snow. And probably all three at once. But Minerva and I were tossing and turning. The poor pup just wandered around, trying to find the coolest spot on the floor, and has continued to lie very still on the ground all day today, vacillating on whether she thinks it's cooler to lie on the carpet with the fan, or on the linoleum of the kitchen/bathroom. We three are waiting here for the A/C repairman who is supposed to come sometime today to check out the unit, but I'm not hopeful. It's only in the movies that people get a repairman to tell them that the only reason they don't have A/C is because a bug died in the unit and had to be removed. We are probably going to be told that the tiny unit in our backyard must have been intended for some other Pacific Northwest city where it's not supposed to get this hot during the summer, and should only be running for the occasional chilly spurt, not all day and night for three days straight. Baaaaah.
Alton is down to just a thin little pair of cotton madras shorts and a diaper (it would be diaper-only, but he will take it off if shorts are not on top) and I'm wearing my pajama boxers because "real" shorts seem like too heavy of fabric. I think our post-lunch snack is going to be frozen fruit bars in the kitchen, which Daddy so helpfully purchased last night. Meanwhile, I have a poll for you all to take! A few weeks ago, I put the movie Alive on our Netflix queue on a whim, because I hadn't seen it in a long time. Now, forgetting for a moment that it's rated R, full of swear words, and we don't normally let Alton watch TV, do you think that I should turn it on? Because really, if a movie about a stranded group of Argentinian rugby players freezing to death in the icy, snowy Andes and eating their friends' corpses to stay alive doesn't cool you down, what will?
Here's a computer camera shot of our living room right now, excuse the graininess. We brought a bunch of Alton's toys downstairs to play since it's marginally cooler down here. The sad black blob on the left is Minerva.