I got up before the birds this morning, or at least before the mourning dove that was still fast asleep in the feeder tray. What's the point of staying in bed when the air is so heavy and wet and the sheets feel like plastic tarps wrapped around my ankles? Better to get up and laugh at the shock-headed mourning dove, who looked like he'd fallen asleep on a bar stool and was liable to get an earful from the management when he woke up.

Already this letter has too many similes. I blame them on the weather.

I get to spend today running errands, and I'm thinking of wearing heels, just for the hell of it. Sometimes the country life drives me to glamorous exigency. When I lived in the city, I never wore heels.

No doubt the temperature will be gruesome, but at least Thomas Carlyle won't be reviewing my latest book. Not that he's always wrong, but oy. . . .

Poor Shelley always was, and is, a kind of ghastly object; colourless, pallid, tuneless, without health or warmth or vigour; the sound of him shrieky, frosty, as if a ghost were trying to "sing" to us; the temperament of him, spasmodic, hysterical, instead of strong or robust; with fine affections and aspirations, gone all such a road:--a man infinitely too weak for that solitary scaling of the Alps which he undertook in spite of all the world.

[from Carlyle's Reminiscences, quoted in Jerome Hamilton Buckley, The Victorian Temper: A Study in Literary Culture]