Planning for the Illinois Heat Wave

Plan A, Plan B, Plan C…Bail?

Heather Lee
2 min readAug 23, 2023
A calico cat lays on a gray table while a black and white tuxedo cat sits on a tan chair next to the table.
The cats: Thalia and Percy. Photo taken by Friend

Plan A

Both of our families stay at our own houses.

Everything works fine.

Plan B

You’re a/c unit goes out.

Your family, including pets, packs up and comes to my house.

My dogs will learn your cats are not chew toys…eventually.

Plan C

My central air goes out.

My family, including pets, packs up and shows up at your house.

Your cats will learn that my dogs are not scratching posts…eventually.

Plan D

The air conditioning goes out in both of our houses.

We pack up our families, including pets, and break into a nearby mattress store with good air conditioning with a McDonalds close by.

The cats and dogs are going to have to figure out territorial lines on their own.

Revision to Plan D

We break into a mattress store with good a/c and a Starbucks next door. Starbucks! Not McDonalds!

Good grief, what was I thinking?!

A copper hound dog and a black and graying husky mix sit next to each other both looking up at the camera.
The dogs: Chloe and Z. Photo taken by Daughter

Plan E

We hope the police station we are dragged off to has good a/c…

And that the mattress store lets us take our mattresses with us.

The dogs are excited to see new people and arrest easily. They take up a lot of our jail cell.

The cats are uncatchable and will wait at the cool mattress store until we post bail. They aren’t idiots.

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Heather Lee
Heather Lee

Written by Heather Lee

One white cane in a sighted world

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