It was 95 degrees Fahrenheit at home today, and triple digits in the previous hometown. Ah, autumns in Southern California. Hot days like this remind me of an email I’d received in college from an advertising ex-coworker who’d transferred to Cal. He wrote of the warming of the weather, his excitement in sensing the approach of summer, and then, “You know what it means when it gets hot, don’t you? The girls, man, the girls. They wear less.”

I was sore before I even worked out at lunch today. It dawned on me that the tight muscles are due to the furniture rearrangement Mr. W and I did last night. His son moved in on Sunday night, so we cleared out the downstairs bedroom which had been serving as a computer room, and hauled a giant solid oak desk from the garage into the dining room. We put the desktop computer on this heavy desk in the dining room, then changed the dining room into a sitting room/den. We then arranged the dining room furniture in a diagonal in the previous den, which was intended to be a breakfast nook anyway. Dodo walked downstairs after the two rooms were rearranged, and inspected the new nooks, crannies and hideouts. He seemed to approve.

Speaking of Dodo, Mr. W has already spoiled him. Because of the warm weather, Mr. W had taken to popping a few ice cubes into Dodo’s water bowl. Dodo loves this and will lap at the water and ice for 10 minutes, not even coming up for air. And now, Dodo will yowl, lead you to the water bowl, look discontentedly at it and then up at you, and yowl again, demanding ice. It’s gotten so Dodo won’t even drink tepid water anymore. He’ll probably break from this habit in the winter, and forget about the ice until Mr. W spoils him again next summer.

It struck me as odd that moving furniture around for half an hour could make me more sore than I had been weight lifting at the gym. And then I realized that sustaining heavy furniture in an elevated and balanced position while moving is way more taxing on my strength than the few weights I’d use at the gym, because when I drop the furniture, I’m completely spent, whereas at the gym, the weights I use are “light” enough that I could do a full range of motion with them for 10-15 reps. No wonder people lose weight when they’re moving, leaving drops of sweat stains on furniture and floors.

My poor tenants are moving into my house this week. Mr. W and I stopped by today to give them mail keys, and they had A/C on full blast. It must’ve been torturous straining and sweating moving heavy furniture in 105-degree weather.