Reading: Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook

Moving: walked maybe 3 miles and swam 1.4K

Watching: "Sex and the City" and "Six Feet Under"

Listening: Alanis Morrissette, Jagged Little Pill

24 June 2001: Summer

I am loving this summer. Last summer was a bad one for me not to have a pool for the first time (yeah, woe is me for owning a house). It was brutally hot; we had 90+ days of 90+ heat. This summer has been so wonderful. This weekend was the first really hot one, so Denver followed the calendar this year and had a spring. Days and weeks of 60s and 70s, and now we're nearly touching 90. I love it.

This morning I drove down to New Mexico to go for a walk with Haitch, who is housesitting. It's only Highlands Ranch, but it's awfully far south. It was hot enough to walk slowly instead of briskly, but without humidity, the air doesn't crush your lungs. We had a nice walk on a trail through covenant developments with lovely views of foothills and a southern bit of ridge whose northern end is Red Rocks and a cliffy bit. (Owning a house in a covenant neighborhood means the friends whose house it is have to paint their outside trim by 15 July, though it looks fine and unpeeling to me; I bet they are required to have a water-thirsty grass lawn and a sprinkler system; and it seems everyone has to have either an SUV or a minivan painted to match their trim. Also the garage is the most prominent feature of each dwelling.)

Afterward, I drove back up to Congress Park and swam. I was two laps short of a mile when the whistle was blown, because I've swimming slower and slower. In the greater part of an hour I spent in the water, a great front had poured down over the mountains and clouds covered the sun. I spent the afternoon planting clematis, since I can't sprout morning glory seeds, and repotting one of my inherited plants, and installing, finally, a clothesline. The clothesline assumes that the new fencepost is strong enough to hold up fence and damp clothes, but as I screwed the reel onto the post, I saw that the wood had split. Pressure-treated indeed.