Between the heat and dealing with our neighbors noisy dogs, we didn't get much rest. They had a couple of huskies, which was fine for the most part, except that they did't take very good care of them. Then they decided to breed them and they had 3 to 5 puppies...I'm not even sure exactly how many. The puppies mostly stayed inside of the house. They kept separating the dogs and they would whine and howl until they were let back in. The worst was when they were weaning the puppies and the mother would make noise for hours and hours until they came home again (sometimes late into the night). Once, it even broke the backdoor window trying to get in to her puppies. They lived in deplorable conditions. Most of the time they would lie in their own filth with little or no shade in temperatures over 100 degrees, sometimes with no water or food. The dogs looked mangy and half starved. They shed most of their fur...which was lying in clumps all over their yard.
We tried talking to the neighbors but that was useless. We tried getting help from animal control, but they were not much help either. They finally started getting rid of them one by one but this situation dragged on for a couple of months. The mother husky was the only one left in the end and then it just disappeared one day. Not sure if they finally managed to kill it off or if they got rid of it. But it was replaced with a new dog by the end of the month. What joy is ours.
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We spent Fourth of July with our friends the Dean's who has their annual firework viewing party downtown. They live on a hill in view of Mt. Rubidioux. It's always good to visit with old friends. The Christensen's put on an excellent bbq for it as usual. Christian took the opportunity of being around so many teens to interview some of them for a project for his adolescence psychology class this term.--------
We spent a couple of weekends here and there helping my mom move. We had to sort through a lot of stuff to help her get rid of all necessary things that she's collected over the years. She's moving into my sister's house and she's going to rent out her house to help pay for my dad's care. It's going to be a long process.
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Emily finished her summer school to make up for the World Lit class she didn't do so well in this past year. She did pretty well in it and has picked up her gpa a bit. We still think their summer school is a bit of a cheat just to get kids not to fail or flunk out entirely. Still, Emily said that some kids flunked it a second time at the end.
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The girls continue their organ lessons and even got to take a small "field trip" to the stake center to check out the bigger organ there.
Their lessons are coming along nicely. They continue their piano practice along with practicing at the organ a couple times a week for a short period of time.
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Marian came over to visit with the girls. She does an annual Christmas in July kind of thing with us. She took them out to the movies and then we met up and she took us out for more sushi. The girls just love it.
She got them a ton of back to school supplies: backpacks, clothes, school supplies and a bunch of snacks. It was pretty insane.
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We didn't have much else going on. I worked on putting up our summer apples. The girls played occasionally with the neighborhood kids. Emily left for her trip to BYU Idaho, Yellowstone and Montana with her grandfather. More on that in my next post.Caitlyn and Christian just did homework. We wanted to do a small weekend camping trip but in the end, decided that it was just too hot to do much of anything. The other places we considered going to was on fire so we stayed holed up in our house most of the time. The summer started off fairly well but in the end, it seemed to be the hottest summer in history. Even with us at home watering the plants all the time, a lot of them suffered and got damaged from the constant high temperatures. All our grapes shriveled up and turned into raisins before they could even fully develop. The guavas all dropped their fruit and many of the developing lemons did as well. Even our oak tree has damaged dried up leaves all over the tree.
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Christian and I did manage to take Caitlyn out bowling one night before Emily got back. She had never tried it before and Christian and I had not been bowling since some time in college. We played three games. The first one, Caitlyn and I did a lot of alley balls. Christian either did really well or just as badly as we were doing for a while. We started to get a hang of it during the second game. By the third, Caitlyn seemed to get too tired and gave up. I think Christian won the first two games and I won the last one but the overall score was also higher than theirs. We all managed to get a strike in there somewhere and a few spares to boot. Christian even got two strikes in a row but couldn't quite manage a third.
We had a pretty good time and was glad that we could get out of the house for a short while to take Caitlyn out for a little fun.
