Does it make the weather more bearable to bitch about it in foreign languages? I don't know. I'll try anything at this point.

It's actually cooled to a reasonable temperature outside by now, but since I have the Apartment of Amazing Heat Retention, it's still baking up here. Woo.

Last night, it was so hot, I took one of those blue freezee things that you can put in lunch sacks to help keep your food cool, wrapped it in a towel, and put it inside my pillow case. Made for a hard pillow, but, oooh, it was blessedly cool.

Had a pleasant day at work today, although I did manage, at one point, to create a major formatting glitch in the process of fixing a minor formatting glitch, and it took me the better part of an hour to undo the mess I'd made.

After work, I hit Borders. The Milpitas Borders is surprisingly well-stocked. I could have dropped a lot of dough just in the Renaissance/Medieval studies section, but I limited myself to purchasing the irresistibly titled Machiavelli in Hell. (I restrained myself from purchasing yet another translation of Dante's Divine Comedy, or portions thereof. Collecting Dante translations can easily become a full-time occupation. I also passed up a rather handsome edition of Chretien de Troyes Arthurian romances. And I laughed very hard at whoever had put George Orwell's 1984 smack in the middle of the Renaissance/Medieval studies section.)

Also picked up Irvin Yalom's Love's Executioner, which was recommended by sister Stephanie. Yalom is a prominent practitioner of existential psychotherapy, which is also the approach to therapy Stephanie favors in her own counseling work. I picked up the book partly in order to understand better exactly what existential therapy is, but it also looks quite interesting in its own right. It seems to be a collection of anecdotes from Yalom's therapy practice.

Stephanie and I were also talking recently about whether reading works on psychology would be useful to fiction writers. Fiction writers are actually useful to psychologists - Stephanie took a class for her degree in which students were required to prepare a mock treatment plan. They can't use real people because of confidentiality issues, so they usually use characters from books or movies. One of Stephanie's classmates did a treatment plan for the main character from A Clockwork Orange. I gather that Holden Caulfield is pretty regularly dissected in these classes.

Somebody should publish an anthology of those. I bet some of them would make fun reading.

Anyway, my final purchase was The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency, first in a series of mystery novels that have been getting favorable reviews in the New York Times Book Review for some time now. I like a good mystery now and then, so I thought I'd give this one a try.

I think that's all the day's excitement. I'm off to go read a book.