(1) I have to throw a shout out to all you awesome peeps who chimed in with advice for how to cool off last week. (Oh, and Matt, I totally ended up getting a squirt bottle. It's a fancy one that's a portable fan with a squrt bottle component, so in addition to the water I get a blast of cool air. It's the best, seriously.) In a nutshell, I've settled on two of these puppies, one for my living room and the other for my bedroom. I run them both on high power pretty much all day, and so far it's actually been quite an improvement. Score for Vornado.

(2) I probably would have written this post sooner, like sometime last week, only I got distracted and took a trip down to San Diego for a couple of days. In addition to working on my tan getting sun-burned at the beach (which was, naturally, a glorious experience), I got to hang out with the impossibly fabulous Tia and the witty and awesome Haligonian Ben (see, Ben? I learned!). We shopped til we dropped, I got new shoes, and judged people for what they were wearing. In other words, it was sheer greatness.

(3) Los Angeles is great right now. Way too hot, sure, but since I have new fans I can just sort of sit in front of them for an hour. There's really nothing quite like it. But really, what's making this place so awesome is that my partner is in town visiting, and ever since I picked him up at the airport on Saturday I've been walking on air. Even the traffic around here hasn't been so bad.

(4) I love having a pool fifteen feet from my front door. I've always loved it, but now it's great that I have a place to go cool off while my steamroom of a house gets the royal A/C treatment. But then I was in the pool tonight, racing the dog back and forth and feeling so confident that I could see all with my fancy little goggles that I didn't even see the stupid chlorine container floating right in front of me. Or should I say, in front of my racing freestyle stroke. My hand connected with that fucking asshole floating device and BAM, my left index finger is suddenly cut open and bleeding. I've sustained worse injuries from swimming before (like that one when I was 10 involving my ankles, a flip turn, and the pool ledge) but that doesn't mean I like typing without the use of all ten of my fingers. Blast.