I started working on a new novel on Sunday. Just now, I came across this story in today's Guardian.

This is a picture of my spice cabinet's current state. I feel that the gods have spoken.

(p.s. When I showed Jonathan the headline, he laughed and laughed. "Well," he said, "they've got you pegged.")

 

The light in my eyes woke me up an hour or so before dawn on Friday morning. It was the full moon shining through our bedroom window, but it looked strange somehow and it took me a minute or two to figure out that a lunar eclipse was happening. So I woke Jonathan up and we stood together at the window and watched the moon get thinner and thinner until, not long before dawn, it winked out entirely.

We were sluggish and, frankly, kind of cranky the rest of the day because of not getting enough sleep and also because of the heat and the humidity that made the air feel like a heavy wool blanket. But it was worth it to stand close to Jonathan at the window in the dark and watch the moon.

The Trofeo de Leone is going on this weekend in memory of our friend Leonardo, so we will go tonight and eat sausages and watch the soccer games and see our friends and think of him.

 

We are -- Jonathan and I -- now living in a world of pure enveloping heat. It is all day. It is all night.

Despite this, the summer social whirl is up and roaring -- albeit with some conversational limitations. Jonathan and I have had social engagements every day this past week and a little routine had emerged: I see someone I haven't seen in days/months/hours/ever and I say, "Oh, hello! How nice to see you! How are you?" and they say "I'm hot!" and I say "So am I" and then there is a little verbal lull because both of us are too hot, quite frankly, to think of anything entertaining to say. 

Not that I don't try. Just yesterday, I regaled some people from Dublin about my intense love of "Irish fucking butter." This was my conversational high point of the evening and it was all downhill from there, including a detailed discussion of the bike-shorts-to-heat-rash pipeline. Summer on the Riviera -- glamorous!

Also, we had a solar eclipse. And yet it brought no relief from the heat.

You would think that having the sun actually go out would perhaps drop the temp a degree of two. But no.

We are the damned.