Dear love, how are you? I'm glad you're feeling vitruvian, me too generally, though wilted at the moment in oppressive heat. I'm feeling a bit frustrated, the day got away from me, guilt-producing since I don't go out to work, so what is my excuse. D accused me, in a verbal lashing out of the blue, of always making excuses. Maybe I do. Maybe that's my form of inventing narrative, coming up with reasons for things. I had started out this morning revved up to do some ambitious cooking - maybe too ambitious - none of it got done. I had a coupon to a stripmall store and tried one last time to find a top to go with the lemon-chiffon skirt patterned with pink & green hibiscus. Didn't find anything that went, or if it went, that looked good on me. I started to feel frustrated, and feeling that I was utterly wasting my time, turning into the sort of person I have never wanted to be - someone who spends too much time shopping. I really hate shopping, but I seem to have been doing too much of it the last week but it will stop. That said, I had yet another coupon - $10-off anything - and so since some of our drinking glasses are chipped - I pulled into the heat-soaked asphalt lot of the big box store, this desolate sea of asphalt punctuated with white parking spot lines, and inexplicably heard birds, occasional ones, somewhere nearby but invisible, singing. In this place, in high heat, talk about a Desolate Landscape. Why would birds - any birds - want to be here, in this vast paved over abomination (I want to say it's over 100,000 square acres - can that be right? I'd have to look it up. I became lightly involved in the opposition to its development, a few years back) when there are certainly greener, more hospitable habitats in the wilds surrounding this manmade crater of devastation.

But I did, with my $10-off coupon, find a set of glasses for which I paid, in the end, 21 cents.

And then I returned home, and my momentum for embarking on a cooking spree had evaporated. At least I got in a walk (early this morning, before the high heat) and a workout to Charlie Rose. The day was feeling like such a write-off that I would have liked to make it a day of bundling together all errands already, and take Rafe to the vet, get it over with (his gums are inflamed again). I had the car, but he was nowhere to be found, and I didn't have a ten-dollar bill (fee for the shot), and so I waited for D to come home for lunch, which he did at three, and it turns out that I couldn't have taken him because the vets do surgeries Wednesday afternoons. So maybe I'll be taking him tomorrow, though I'd rather stay home and get to cooking.

I'm horrible, aren't I? That's how I'm feeling today. Excuses: maybe it's the heat. I don't know. I'm just tired of Rafe being such a problematic cat, honestly, I don't even like him that much. We have spent a fortune on him, on his bimonthly ten-dollar shots for the last several years, plus gas & tolls, and the time it takes to take him there. Now I'm really feeling horrible about myself - I'm a witch. How can I have such thoughts - honestly, I wish we could put him down - but how can I say that (here, that is, on this blog - not to D, or to Rafe)? I realize how monstrous that makes me sound.

So D blew up at me - a verbal lashing because (excuses) he was overly hungry when he came home. Fine, so I'll take him tomorrow, he snapped. No, I will take him, we don't need D to lose yet more income from this high-road excuse.

Darling, some days this blog is just going to take this turn, I'm sorry. It was either write this nonsense, a glimpse of my day as it actually went, or nothing at all, or worse - to lie, not to happily invent when my mood is there, but to fake it.

All that said, I'm not in a bad mood, just perspiring it's so hot (and I took two showers today). I'm just admitting to dark thoughts I sometimes have, that don't cast me in the best light. And they're still there, and the frustration, unchanged as ever. I don't know what tomorrow will bring, either taking Rafe to the vet, or cooking, probably not both. Though I shouldn't say that. Maybe I can manage both, if I take Rafe early. And when I come home there should be Netflix DVDs in the mail, so on another 90-plus degree day I may be very happy to sit under the ceiling fan at the kitchen table & slice and dice.

We'll see. That's tomorrow.

Do I hear distant rumblings of thunder now? Maybe.

I changed the water in the birdbath in the garden today - in the sun it gets too hot, and then evaporates. And so I rinsed out the bath, and put in cool water - and was delighted to see, an hour or two later, a robin dip its toes, its wings, and then a cluster of other small birds, bathing themselves.

Probably that birdbath should be moved to a shady spot, maybe near the north garden.

And that's it darling, for now. I've thought about you a lot today, as always - as always, a delight to think of you. I was driving up the horrible stripmall highway on my way home this afternoon, and found myself laughing aloud thinking of you and me, the silly things I post that you seem (as I think from when you flash your highbeams) to enjoy. Are you and I crazy? Maybe! But - you know, it works, it's okay. At least we have a bit of style about it, wouldn't you say?

Yes, that really is thunder, my love. Let me sign off. How long is this hand-knitted scarf anyway? Oh, time to cast off...

XOXO

7:30. Dark skies, rolling thunder overhead, seashell clatter of hail, on roof, windowsills, driveway, garden, oh dear battering no doubt my newly planted annual seedlings, and I hope tonight's hail doesn't adversely affect the beginning of the distribution of the copious bounty of the CSA farm, already delayed a week, as regretfully announced in a message to shareholders, from a hailstorm earlier in the season...