I am so not ready for today's forecasted high temperature.

On the other hand, I am enjoying the reading on the bathroom scale every morning after gallons and gallons of sweat have seeped out of my body overnight. This is the kind of weight loss program a couch potato loves, except I'm not a couch potato. I have a recliner. A Lazy Boy at that.

The good thing about the hot weather is having a bit of an incentive to work on The Artists. It looks like this story will definitely end at Chapter 20. Once you read Chapter 19, which I hope will be out sometime in August, I'm sure you'll understand.

Yesterday I read the last two and a half chapters of Olive Kitteridge, this year's Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction. It's a fairly easy read and I remember coming across only one "literary" word, i.e., those words that never occur in common usage but tend to show up in literary work if only to justify all those years it took to get that MFA. This one was asseverate. This novel is a collection of short stories where Olive Kitteridge appears in each as either protagonist, antagonist, a secondary character, or in a few cases simply mentioned. There's a study guide at the end of the book and one of the questions was: Did you like Olive? I said No. It also asked if Olive reminded me of someone. I said my mother. If you're interested in reading about a domineering, opinionated, unforgiving bitch, I recommend Olive Kitteridge.

Last night I started God's Little Acre, a book which surprisingly I have never read. I haven't read Tobacco Road, either, and will probably read that next. The only bad thing about both of these books is that they'll probably remind me too much of my in-laws. The wife tells stories about being raised in rural Arkansas down in the delta lands around Dumas, and later in Lincoln County when her father started hauling pulp wood with his brother, and they were poor. They built their first house using lumber from a barn that was destroyed in a tornado. The kids went to the dump quite often to find useful things. When you're really poor, the dump becomes your department store.

Damn it's hot and it's not even noon.