A Cool Feast for the Eyes...

Painting by Steve Barton

So there's no Friday Feast today...I'm ad libbing with photos of things that make me feel cool.

I am as much at home in the water as I am on land - it may be because I look like a manatee, not sure. But I love floating and swimming in the cool water. That first, breath-taking dive - you know the one I mean - and then after that your body, feeling exhilarated, forgets how beastly hot it was just moments before!

I saw it with my own eyes - the thermometer outside my kitchen window registered 112°.

Just seeing that somehow makes you even hotter than you were five seconds prior! It's a psychological attack as well as a physical one. I'm trying very hard not to whine because there are folks in Las Vegas who are suffering at 116°, so you know it's gotta be at least 120 out in the boonies. Baker was supposed to be 123. And Phoenix is off the charts, too. Neither man nor beast was created to live in heat like that, well, scorpions perhaps. And I am on a daily hunt for Black Widows as we are inundated with them. They seem to thrive in this weather. It's fitting that only vile creatures like that would exist without difficulty in this kind of heat.

I want to be floating alongside the baby duck, without a care in the world...