Just about a perfect day today. The temperature was precisely right for my personal comfort—which means it would probably be a little warm for most people. I’m a cold-blooded beast. The thermometer usually reads about 98.2 when the nurse pulls it from my mouth and reads it. I blame this condition for my inability to endure cold. When my brothers are thumping their chests and saying, “Isn’t this great? It’s so bracing!” I’m cupping my hands over my ears to keep them warm (cupping them very carefully, though. Touching them too forcefully might shatter them like cheap plastic cups from a convenience store pop machine).

We could use some rain, but if it were raining it wouldn’t be a perfect day, would it? “Seek not contrary pleasures,” said Dr. Johnson.

One disappointment I’ve suffered during my afternoon walks down to Crystal Lake and back has been the lack of girls in bikinis sunning themselves along the shore. Crystal Lake has been sorely deficient in the sunbathing girls department. More often the shore has been encircled by an unbroken ring of Hmong people, all of them with fishing poles, pulling sunfish 2 centimeters long out of the water for supper.

But today that was remedied. I didn’t get an ideal look at the girl (no doubt that was her intention) as she was lying on a fairly steep slope that runs down from the street to the water’s edge, but she seemed to be not ugly, and she was in a bikini.

Maybe it’ll be a good weekend.

There was another form of beauty too—butterflies. I suppose it’s unmanly of me, but I love butterflies. They seem to me an entirely useless addition to the environment. I’m sure their ecological niche could have been filled by something brown that looked like one of the more undistinguished moths. But God gave us flowers that flew, just as a treat.

That’s how I think of butterflies. They’re a gift. A grace note. A cherry on top of the sundae of summer.

Have a good weekend.