Mona Lisa Dog Butt

I call this photo "Dog Butt with Dahlias." It's every bit as mysterious and enigmatic as the Mona Lisa, wouldn't you say? That is a dog butt worthy of Leonardo.

That was my view as I sat in the garden yesterday morning finishing "The Tender Bar." Olga was not put off by our heat wave. As usual, she moved between the shade and the sun -- perhaps the only difference was that while she usually favors the sun, yesterday she stuck mostly to the shade. I doused her with cool water from the hose in the early afternoon and though she didn't seem to appreciate it at the time, she did stop panting.

We have now emerged from our two day blast-furnace into something resembling a normal summer. It's 66º F (19º C) as I sit down to write this morning. But we do have some damage. Our garden, which normally feels like a cool oasis, is parched and wilted, a sort of dusty, tired green despite our repeated watering. A hydrangea that Dave moved just before the heat wave (bad timing) looks like it's been blowtorched. The hanging basket of pansies on the front porch has collapsed into a smoldering ruin.

That was my phone at 1:15 p.m. yesterday, and that's as hot as it got where we are, though apparently some areas got just above 104º F (40º C). See how the forecast shows rain on Wednesday and Friday? Well, as it stands now, we have a 50-70 percent chance of rain late this afternoon, and I am certain it won't be anywhere near as much as we need. That rain prediction on Friday has disappeared. (How did we go from an 80 percent chance to nothing? Beats me.)

We got a smattering of rain yesterday evening when the heat broke, just enough to dampen the leaves of the plants, but not enough to measure. I took more water down to the sorry street tree and was happy to see that someone else had also watered it. It's still going to take a miracle for that thing to pull through.

As planned, we went to the movies again yesterday afternoon. We saw "Elvis," which I found surprisingly good and even touching, despite the fact that it's directed by Baz Luhrmann whose flashy movies I almost never like, and the fact that I've never been an Elvis fan myself. Best of all -- it was 2 hours and 40 minutes long, which meant with trailers and advertisements we were in that air conditioned cinema for more than three hours. Heaven!

We certainly had a better day than people in some parts of London, where there were disastrous fires fueled by sun-crisped vegetation, melting roadways and heat-buckling surfaces. An article I saw online said we can expect these sorts of temperatures every three years or so. The new normal.



In the evening, as Dave and I did a final round of watering, I saw my first Jersey tiger moth of the summer, fluttering around our patio.

And like Olga, our pink dahlia wasn't put off too much by the heat. It still managed to crank out its first flower of the season.