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There’s nothing like a wonderful visit in the afternoon with a good friend. Where you see her beautiful, happy, healthy, sweet baby girl giggling, cooing and chewing on her toes. Makes up just a little bit for all the hair falling out of my head in the shower in the morning. Blech!

I finished Henning Mankell’s Faceless Killers this morning. I’ve come to the conclusion that mysteries are the perfect summer read. They’re captivating and funny, sometimes interesting but always shocking in some way. They are rewarding in the way that Law and Order is rewarding. Thanks to JKS for recommending the book—I couldn’t put it down, just like the other mystery I read lately.

Oh, and I gave up on the quest to read the “classics” of literature, in this bloody heat, it’s impossible.

So, Faceless Killers finds Ystad (in Sweden) police inspector Kurt Wallander trying to solve a very difficult case. Two elderly farmers are attacked late one winter evening. The husband bludgeoned to death and his wife left for dead with her head in a noose. As the woman expires in the hospital, the last word she utters is “foreign”, over and over again. This sends Wallander, a rough and ready cop with a broken marriage and an even worse case of insomnia, on a crazy ride to find the killers. It’s a solid book that intertwines the mystery with the ins and outs of Swedish politics, in terms of how the country deals with immigration. Now I’m going to have to look up the rest of the books in the bloody series. Mysteries are even more addictive than chick lit.

The city continues to swelter under smog and high temperatures. Walking around downtown everyone complains about the weather and looks miserable. Sitting in a government office waiting doesn’t make anyone more happy either. It’s strange, how the weather affects people, and how we spend so much of our time figuring ways around it instead of figuring out ways to live in it.

We’ve got air conditioning so we can close our windows and doors, chill ourselves to the bone and ignore summer. Only now Toronto Hydro is urging people to reduce electricity because it’s about to blow—well not seriously, but we’re consuming way, way too much these days. I feel guilty just turning it on at night, but my RRBF can’t take the heat either, like so many people I know.

We drive everywhere, which contributes to the smog, which makes us need the air conditioning, which drives up the electricity, which makes our footprint bigger, which makes me think of the frog on the log in the middle of the lake, and so on. But it’s not so much the driving, as the people who leave their cars idling. The silly morons who are still convinced that SUVs (aka Stupid Useless Vehicles) are needed for the off-roading on Jameson between King and Queen Streets.

And now, all of you in SUVs should drive around with egg on your face. The US are going to destroy a small section of the caribou’s natural migration and/or habitation in the north for SIX MONTHS of oil. Six months. Resources that will last for less than half a year will destroy hundreds of thousands of years of natural habitat. What’s wrong with you?

And no wonder Canadians “hate” Americans so much. What’s wrong with those people who voted for the oil drilling, how short-sighted are they? How little do they care about the Earth, the animals, the environment. I’m getting so upset just thinking about it, and before you say it, yes, it just happens to be that time of the month.

I want to call in sick the day this film opens and go see it with all my girlfriends. If it’s one tenth as good as the book, it’ll be an amazing girlie movie. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

My stack of “to read” books (if I did them according to height) might not be as tall as the Penguin Classics offer out there right now (link via Publishers Lunch), but it’s certainly up there. And in light of the fact that I’ll probably never make it through the other list I posted here, I’m moving on to some of the books coming out this fall that I really can not wait to read. They are in no particular order:

1. Elizabeth Ruth. Smoke. I’m not saying this because I did a delightful interview with her over on chicklit, and I’m not listing it simply because she’s a friend, but because she’s a wonderful writer, and I really liked Ten Good Seconds of Silence.

2. John Irving. Until I Find You. John Irving’s books have carried me through difficult times. A Prayer For Owen Meany remains one of the greatest American novels published in the second half of last century. Irving remains one of our greatest writers (I claim him for Canada, if only because I know he often claims Canada for himself), but his last few books have been disappointing. There’s nothing that I despise more than reading mid-life crises on the page. (Salmon Rushdie, I’m looking at you, don’t duck—they’re just words.) Fingers crossed this book brings us back into the fold, and doesn’t convince me to stop reading Irving all together.

3. Michael Cunningham. Specimen Days. The Hours—need I say more.

4. Jane Urquhart. A Map of Glass. I took a field trip to see the church she wrote about in The Stonecarvers. I wonder where this book will send me? Somewhere inspiring, I’m sure.

5. Elizabeth Kostova. The Historian. This book is getting so much buzz that I’m almost afraid to read it because I’m afraid it’ll turn out like The Crimson Petal and the White, which was quite possibly the worst book I’d read in years. However, this book is about Dracula? How can anyone resist Dracula? Honestly!

At a trade show for work, I stood in line, like the true geek that I am, to meet Kim Cattrall, and to get her autograph. Overall, after years upon years of watching television, Sex and the City remains one of my all-time favourite shows. So when I saw that she was there, wearing a lovely yellow summer dress and these fabulous yellow pumps, I couldn’t be cool and nonchalant—I wanted an autograph.

With absolutely no intention to buy her book, with nothing except awe for absolutely stunning she is in real life, I stood there with the rest of the adoring public for my chance to say hello. She was charming. We complimented her shoes, then she winked at us, and went on signing for the rest of her adoring public. You know, it took all of my self-control to not let my impishness win: all I wanted to do was ask, “So what really happened with you and SJP, and is the SATC movie really on the rocks?” But alas, I didn’t, thanked her kindly for her scribble, and went back to work. Sigh.

Oh, and when I was in line for some cucumber maki, Sook-Yin Lee came up beside me and ordered some sashimi. A pale star gazing moment compared to Sunday’s luminary flash of inspiration of just seeing Kim Cattrall.

I made the grave mistake yesterday of biking to my errands. Now that I’ve bought my tickets for my fabulous birthday trip to Europe (oh, how Victorian of me!), there are a few things I need: travel bag, travel-sized toiletries, and the list goes on. And since the meds are making my scalp really itchy and dry, I wanted to find some nice shampoo that might help. So, I decided to ride my bike. Whew, what a mistake that was—it was 34 degrees in Toronto yesterday, without the humidex. Which meant that I was biking around mid-day in 45 degree weather, in the shade.

Silly ragdoll, you say. Silly ragdoll indeed. By the time I got home, I was dehydrated (regardless of drinking an entire bottle of water), faint, and feeling really overheated. Insane! Maybe it was a bit of heat stroke, who knows, but it turned me into the crankiest, angriest girl I’d been in a long time.

I tried to sleep, and then made dinner, did the dishes and felt much better. The RRBF wasn’t much better. After spending the last few days clearing out the rest of the crap from the basement, paying to get all the garbage hauled out of the backyard, then fixing the leaking plumbing, he was so tired that he spent the entire day either in front of the television or on the computer.

Strange thing this heat, we beg for it all winter and then when it comes around it’s a bit too much for us to take. Ah, the subtle irony of living in Canada with its extreme fluctuations.

The good news is that we didn’t drive the car yesterday, I didn’t take any extra bags for shopping and tried not to turn the air conditioning on until we absolutely had to. I’m still trying to be a better person for the environment, but it’s hard.

Today’s the beginning of a big conference for work, so I’ll be at work this afternoon and all day tomorrow. Wish me luck!

Fridays are the worst days. So tired. So frustrated. More tomorrow when I’m feeling better. Sigh.

As Dan Brown’s book remains a bestseller well over the two-year mark, I’ve been watching with a morbid curiosity all the crazy stuff that pops up from this work of fiction.

I read this article (link via bookslut) by Christopher Hitchens, who hated the book, generally echoing the consensus among, ahem, learned individuals that the writing is terrible (I got part-way through and then tossed the book into the corner screaming).

This woman created a cute comic, riffing on the book. Someone’s now writing a biography on Dan Brown (link via Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind). And some other fellow is really peeved that the publisher isn’t going to publish the book in paperback and time soon.

Let’s not forget the numerous television specials or useless amount of ink spilled on whether or not the theories found in the novel are true. Ahem, it’s a novel people, A NOVEL!

On the one hand, I’m thrilled that one book has spawned this much attention. It’s making people read, which I’m always thrilled about—maybe someone who hasn’t read a book in a long while will read this book and then be encouraged to read something else, something perhaps not written by Dan Brown. But on the other hand, there’s something in me that wishes the world would just wake up and realize the book is a terribly written product of someone’s imagination, and not take it so seriously—that is until Tom Hanks stars in the movie in the summer of 2006. Sigh.

Everyday I get about 25-30 emails that aren’t junk mail per se, but various newsletters that I’ve subscribed to for “research” purposes. And one of the newspapers in the UK that sends me a note every morning had this to day, “Standby: Britain: The waste that fuels our energy crisis.” The article talks at length about how everyday electrical equipment is a source of energy waste by leaving things on standby. And it got me thinking, about Live 8, about my ecological footprint, and about how the world is now, more than ever, geared to a throw-away society.

When did the world change? I remember having an environmental conference when I was in my last year of high school, at the very least a decade ago, where we urged the world to think about its consumption of oil, the use of Styrofoam and how important it is to recycle. Now, I see commercials for throwaway toilet brushes—because the simple old-fashioned toilet brush has become ungainly and inefficient?

Now, I drive to work the majority of the time. I could take the transit, but it would take me close to two hours to get to where I needed to go. Yet, I feel increasingly guilty about driving, that price of gas, or oil in general, is making the world a sick, greedy place.

I turn off my lights, but take a shower every day. I planted a garden to help with the smog, but have to water it every night. I ride my bike on days when I’m at the downtown office, but we drive to get groceries almost every weekend. We use cloth bags, but so much of the food is pre-packaged. And I’m not even going to think about the medical waste involved in the research to find drugs for my disease.

How much has the world changed since I was naive and thought that by the time I reached this age, people would actually start caring more about their environment and less about their comfort. It’s a melancholy thought, but I struggle with it all the time. And now, I’ve got to go water the garden.