Tiring Out the Dog

Remember what I said about our nights cooling off? Yeah, never mind. The last two nights have been pretty darn warm. We can sleep with the fan but it hasn't been comfortable.

Today, though, our hot spell is supposed to break. It's 67º F right now and it's supposed to climb to a high of 80º F (or 27º C). That I can handle.

As you can see, the bathing beauty in our neighbors' front garden has been given a pair of sunglasses to help her cope with the hot, bright summer. They're not positioned very well, sadly. I imagine she's still struggling with some glare.

Bailey had a restless night on Thursday -- she got us up two or three times -- and I'm convinced it's because Dave and I didn't give her a second walk in the afternoon as usual. (We went to "The Odyssey" instead, as I mentioned in my previous post.) So yesterday, I gave her a long morning walk through the neighborhood, where we found a little stencil of a bicycle-riding mouse, among other things.

Then, in the afternoon, I took her to Hampstead Heath to give her a swim. Unfortunately, after walking all the way there, we found this sign at the dog beach:

Well, that's a bummer. I'm glad there's no obvious sign of dangerous algae, and I'm glad they're testing, but it's a shame the beach was closed.

So I took Bailey over to Sandy Heath, to the pond there -- the one with the duckweed -- and it wasn't closed or posted. I let her swim as usual, though I'm beginning to think (as some of you have said) that maybe I shouldn't when the weather is so hot and it's been so dry. Even with no visible sign of dangerous algae, those are the conditions in which it forms.

It's interesting -- growing up in Florida I always had dogs, and I lived on couple of different lakes, and I don't remember ever hearing about the risk of blue-green algae. We always just let the dogs swim if they wanted and everything was fine. I mean, they're dogs, right?! They're made to ingest filth! I guess that's why I'm a little skeptical of this risk, but perhaps I should take it more seriously. (I do always look first for visible algae, for what that's worth, but apparently its presence is not always obvious.)

So, Bailey girl, this may be your last swim for a while -- at least until it starts raining again. If it ever does.

She did have fun and she got a lot of exercise, so mission accomplished. After a bath when we got home she was downright exhausted, and we all slept like logs.

We had our new upstairs neighbors, Ian and Sarah, over for drinks last night. Their 10-year-old daughter came too, but she quickly grew bored and didn't particularly like the zero-sugar Irn Bru we gave her (the only soda we had, a freebie from a take-away order), so she went back upstairs in short order. The adults had a good time chatting and I think we're going to get along with these neighbors just fine.

While we were talking, Ian's phone exploded with a loud alert sound, and then Dave's went off too, and then mine. In fact we could hear phones going off all around us, in nearby houses and apartments. It was the UK government sending a "severe alert" about the high risk of wildfires, and discouraging people from using barbecues, fireworks and that kind of thing. I can't remember ever getting a mass alert on my phone from the UK government, so that was interesting in a mildly scary way.