Whew! We survived the weekend heat dome. I'm very thankful we were able to keep the house cool. It's heat like this that makes me glad that I can run a fountain for the bees and birds. I saw one parched looking hummingbird taking a rest with its beak held wide open and was glad it was able to get a drink. Usually, they just land on top of the basalt column and take a sip; this one was hovering next to the column and drinking the overflowing water. It's possible the water was too hot for a full on bird bath: it was warm to the touch coming out until I renewed the basin's reservoir from the garden hose.
The dog handled the heat fairly well, but the cats objected to be cooped up inside during the day. We let them outside at night, once the pavement had cooled off. On the up side, being forced to share space with the dog (who really just wants to lick them and say "hi" dog-style), seems to have made the cats slightly more tolerant of the dog. They've gone from "OMG! A dog! We're gonna die!" to "Such a shame she wandered / into our enclosure ...."
I went into work the other day; the office is still mostly working remotely, but I'm finding that I need to start transitioning into physically going in. Even for summer term, campus is still sparsely populated. My office Windows machine hasn't been updated in a while, and I think it took something like three hours for it to download version upgrades. Part of the length of the upgrade may be due to the machine's age; it's easily from 2012. It won't be able to handle the Windows 11 release (I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing).
My co-workers also came in for work, and we took a lunch break together. I always forget that I'm kind of tall because everyone's the same height on Zoom. It was nice to visit with folks who I've only met virtually since my hiring last year. It was also weird to be physically present... and working on different machines than my personal machine at home took a little getting used to (I'm not a huge fan of web-based MS Office, and this summer I'm going to have to get MS Office on various machines running the same version).
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