It's July. In Vegas. Not good.
Both Tweedles had just arrived,when I went up to where the kids' rooms are to check on them. On the top step, the heat hit me like a brick wall. "What the heck! Why's it so hot up here?" The thermostat read ninety-two degrees.
"We told you!" came three simultaneous voices from opposite directions.
"When?"
"At least ten times," said Sunshine. I knew it must be true, because of the simultaneous voices thing, but I swear I hadn't heard them at all--which concerns me. But that's for another time.
"Balthazar? You better get up here."
Turns out that the something coils froze, when we hadn't turned off the unit on the previous night, which turned out to be an unusually cool 4th of July. (Happy Belated Independence Day! by the way. I was too busy celebrating to be blogging.)
Fortunately, the solution was simple, we merely needed to turn off the system for eight hours to let the ice melt from the something coils.
But this meant reconfiguring the sleeping arrangements. Several times. All night long. Because, of course, nobody could sleep.
(This was fine for Sunshine and her Tweedle, who were planning a Gossip Girl marathon, and didn't intend to sleep anyway.)
The Storm and her Tweedle started here, downstairs, where the air conditioning was working, in the family room adjoining the kitchen:
But there was a slow leak in the air mattress, and the big girls were good enough to treat them to ice cream at midnight! Anyway, it's no wonder that there arrived monsters to scratch at the kitchen cupboards, shortly thereafter.
In the wee hours of morning, they came to find me, where Hollywood and I were sleeping here:
Having never slept under the open stars, we were both pretty excited. And it was fantastic! The air was a wonderful 70-something degrees, the stars were glorious, and the breeze was soft. When I imagined the early settlers sleeping under this same sky, I drifted off feeling peacefully connected to the bigger picture. But this didn't last long. Shortly before the nine-year-olds arrived, my hips, aching, and the huge moon, having made it's way around to shine almost as bright as the girls' flashlights in my eyes, had me wide awake.
I resettled the girls in The Storm's room, where they felt they'd be safe from scratching monsters, covering them with a light sheet. This was at one o'clock.
An hour and a half later, having determined it was, indeed, too hot in there (although Sunshine and her Tweedle somehow spent the night in the adjoining sauna) but ready to sleep now that the ice cream had worn off, I moved them downstairs again, where we made a makeshift bed of the couch and the loveseat.
Hollywood woke me again at five, to tell me the sun had come up, and that he was happy for the experience of sleeping under the stars, but he was vacating the balcony for his bedroom. I did the same.
Balthazar, well-rested from his night alone in our cool room, woke me again at six to advise that the air condition was fixed and that he was off to work.
Only now, at ten thirty in the morning, is The Coop beginning to stir in their finally, cooled rooms.
But I've already snapped my pics of them, and this morning's skyline, so I'm ready.
"Pancakes anyone?"
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