July is off to a broiling start.

It must be a hundred degrees already, which usually doesn't happen till late July or early August. The weather gods aren't paying attention. Or maybe they're switching things around to see if we're paying attention.

The temperatures have been way up there for weeks now, with no sign of dropping. No cold snaps coming our way, which is a good thing because maybe the hurricanes won't come our way either. A large storm was rolling around the Gulf this week. I think they named it Bertha. Fortunately, Bertha changed her course and went out to sea. I wonder if everyone in New Orleans watches the weather more carefully now, as each hurricane season approaches. Probably not. I would imagine that they just keep making those beignets and mint juleps and hoping for the best.

We met K & B at Star Pizza for lunch the other day. Another delicious Chicago-style deep-dish pizza. Spinach and cheese again for me, this time with a whole wheat crust. One slice and that was it, and I brought the rest home. I've been eating the rest, one slice a day at lunch time rather than dinner time (more hours to work off the calories). My husband gets his own pizza, loaded with all kinds of meat, which I won't touch.

I've started walking again, with our next-door neighbor V. I saw her walking alone one night when we were driving home from dinner out, so the next morning I asked her if she wanted company. "Sure 'nuff!" was her answer. The two-and-a-half mile walks go very quickly. V's in-laws have moved from Florida to Texas, and she and her husband have been doing everything they can to make the transition easy for them. But how does that old saying go?-- "The older you get, the more set in your ways you get." And that's exactly what V and her husband are dealing with now. So rather than going into everyone's yard and pulling up weeds (which V is famous for), all the neighbors are probably silently thanking me for walking with her after dinner. V is so intent on telling me what's going on with her in-laws while we're walking that she hasn't pulled up one weed in the past three weeks. But we have done our share of picking up empty soda cans in the park as we walk, then tossing them into the trash cans as we pass them. What is it with kids and soda cans?! Is there a teenage peer-pressure code that says it's not cool to toss away the empty cans?

Our Miss C stopped by today to "hang out," as she calls it, and to tell us about her summer job. She's working in one of the local stores, the kind that sells three thousand varieties of silk flowers and seventeen million different articles for every kind of art and/or craft project that you can think of. She likes the job, but wishes they would take her off of the cash register and let her stock and re-arrange the shelves. In just one day's time at the cash counter, one customer told C that she should "praise the lord and declare herself a Christian," and another customer told her that an item was part of a 50%-off sale when in truth it wasn't on sale at all. I told C that in less than five years, she would look back on this first summer job of hers and laugh at everything that she's complaining about now.