Last night I brought materials for root beer floats to the writing salon and, golly, you'd think I'd brought Olympian nectar. Everyone, it seems, swoons over root beer floats. I'd had no idea. But now we both know: if it's late July and you want to make a friend happy, fix them a root beer float.

It was a good-company evening and a good writing evening too. I produced a big messy emotional draft that I'm looking forward to revisiting and a stupid one that I never care if I read again but that did make people laugh, so there's that.

Today will mostly be housework, meal planning, maybe some shopping, though I hope I'll be doing some writing as well. We're having, for us, a sizable dinner party tomorrow night: seven people crammed around our little dining-room table . . . unless the weather cooperates and I somehow figure out a way for us to eat outside. So I need to figure out the menu and maybe do some early prep: I have a vision of individual Bavarian creams or pannacotta; also on my mind: cold cucumber soup garnished with sweet corn and fresh dill. We'll see what transpires.

Currently, the weather is not cooperating at all . . . flirting with 90 degrees today and heavily humid and all-around miserable. I'll go out to pick blueberries early, and then retreat to my desk and my vacuum cleaner. I've been reading friends' poetry and essay collections; I've been reading a Robertson Davies novel; I've been busily revising a poem; and today is my older son's 29th birthday, so I am thinking of him all the time, my dear one, so far away and so close, first of the two best things I ever made.