beastly hot

I wandered down town this morning (in my air conditioned car) to stop at River Rock and Ace Hardware. I bought a little chair for Elliot and a bag of charcoal. Good to get home to the cool.

Regis and I are heading to Mankato this afternoon. He has his stress test at the hospital and I am getting a hair cut and maybe making a stop at my favorite consignment store.

If we have time, we'll have a late lunch when he's done. Gus will be at the Paw.

Tom brought us their covered swing to borrow for Regis' recovery from knee surgery. It looks like this...without the lake. It's too hot and I'm too lazy to walk out to the patio to take my own picture.

Even in this heat, we like to sit on the patio every day. It's tolerable when there is a breeze, as there was last evening. Regis has a cold beer and a cigar and I have a glass of white wine on ice. It's lovely.

The dog days of summer. I'm trying to remember this for January. Sensory memory, right?

I have a book to recommend. It's called Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter.

Here's a clip of the review on Amazon:

The story begins in 1962. On a rocky patch of the sun-drenched Italian coastline, a young innkeeper, chest-deep in daydreams, looks out over the incandescent waters of the Ligurian Sea and spies an apparition: a tall, thin woman, a vision in white, approaching him on a boat. She is an actress, he soon learns, an American starlet, and she is dying.
And the story begins again today, half a world away, when an elderly Italian man shows up on a movie studio's back lot—searching for the mysterious woman he last saw at his hotel decades earlier.
What unfolds is a dazzling, yet deeply human, roller coaster of a novel, spanning fifty years and nearly as many lives. From the lavish set of Cleopatra to the shabby revelry of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Walter introduces us to the tangled lives of a dozen unforgettable characters: the starstruck Italian innkeeper and his long-lost love; the heroically preserved producer who once brought them together and his idealistic young assistant; the army veteran turned fledgling novelist and the rakish Richard Burton himself, whose appetites set the whole story in motion—along with the husbands and wives, lovers and dreamers, superstars and losers, who populate their world in the decades that follow. Gloriously inventive, constantly surprising, Beautiful Ruins is a story of flawed yet fascinating people, navigating the rocky shores of their lives while clinging to their improbable dreams.

 Tomorrow, we're celebrating Independence Day. Regis is foregoing the parade with his knees and the heat. Tiffany and I will join the other off-spring in the usual spot. Bob and Emily are having a gathering and we'll go there for a while. Tiffany is determined to have cheese curds at the park so if we can stand it, we'll make that foray. That will be about enough for me.

The next day is Regis' 60th birthday! We're going to celebrate in a minimal fashion, for us, by cooking a big ass steak on the grill, making a big salad, and sitting on the patio. Hey, it sounds like most of our days! I bought him a new bottle of Angel for Men which I think smells like sugar cookies. Remember the movie Michael? Cookies...aphrodisiac. Hahaha!

Happy and safe Independence Day if I don't get back here tomorrow!