Laces for a lady, letters for a spy

My air conditioner appears to work.

I cannot say this news fills me with inexpressible happiness, because I seem to have typed that sentence just fine, but I am pretty pleased about it. This is the window unit I had in New Haven; it was redistributed to my brother and his wife when I had to move, spent several years with them in different apartments, and then went into storage when they left Connecticut. When my father came on Wednesday to help with the installation, it was not at all clear that it was still a functioning air conditioner rather than a very awkward grade of fan, much less that it could be fit into one of this apartment's amazingly broken windows. Four pieces of wood and a quarter of a roll of duct tape later, it is not the greatest temperature-adjusting experience of my life (I think the air conditioning at the Jane takes precedence in recent months anyway), but my room is perceptibly cooler than either the stairwell or the main body of the apartment and that will do for now.

This was a good, free-form day. I spent most of the afternoon in Lexington, because I wanted to buy fruit from Wilson Farms; it turned out they sell the entire range of specialty peanut butters from Peanut Butter & Co. and I sent derspatchel a rapturous message to inform him I'd just bought the kind with honey. The Strawberry Festival was going on, so I got handed samples of strawberry soup and strawberry rhubarb crumble and the chocolate-dipped strawberries were not free, but they were very tasty. ("They're a little rare," the young man said apologetically, handing me an example so freshly immersed, it was dripping on my fingers.) I went home and made a cold roast beef sandwich for dinner, very rare, with goat's milk brie and horseradish sauce. Solstice ice cream with my family had not worked out on Friday, so I walked into Davis Square in search of J.P. Licks, carrying a chocolate croissant and some assorted media—mostly P.D.Q. Bach CDs—for Rob. hermitgeecko and ratatosk were grilling on the back porch. Rob came out for ice cream with me and while I didn't need anything from the Boston Burger Company, I was perfectly happy to watch him eat a burger that was like a short stack with bacon and maple barbecue sauce. Came home, had to wash all my credit and museum cards with alcohol because they spilled out of my wallet on the bus and bus floors are disgusting; ended up introducing adrian_turtle to Peter Bellamy's settings of Kipling by singing most of them. Stopped when I realized it was after one in the morning and I didn't hate the downstairs neighbors that much.

And my room is not molten.

I don't want to tempt fate, but it's nice.