summer Sunday

Cups of coffee this morning: 2

Minutes into the Spain-Netherlands World Cup game: 86

Goals: Zero all.

Sense of stress even though I don't really care that much about soccer? 9/10

In other news, Hamish Bowles at Vogue offers a highly entertaining, entirely persnickety account of surfing. Having surfed only once in my entire life (if, in fact, one can have claimed to surf when one did not ever quite stand up on the board without falling down), I love, love, love the novelty with which Bowles treats the whole experience.

(Yes, I was already on about this on Twitter.)

Another summer read you just have to love, courtesy the great L.M. Montgomery:

'A tall, slim girl, "half-past sixteen," with serious gray eyes and hair which her friends called auburn, had sat down on the broad red sandstone doorstep of a Prince Edward Island farmhouse one ripe afternoon in August, firmly resolved to construe so many lines of Virgil.
'But an August afternoon, with blue hazes scarfing the harvest slopes, little winds whispering elfishly in the poplars, and a dancing splendor of red poppies outflaming against the dark coppice of young firs in a corner of the cherry orchard, was fitter for dreams than dead languages. The Virgil soon slipped unheeded to the ground, and Anne, her chin propped on her clasped hands, and her eyes on the splendid mass of fluffy clouds that were heaping up just over Mr. J. A. Harrison's house like a great white mountain, was far away in a delicious world where a certain schoolteacher was doing a wonderful work, shaping the destinies of future statesmen, and inspiring youthful minds and hearts with high and lofty ambitions.
'To be sure, if you came down to harsh facts ... which, it must be confessed, Anne seldom did until she had to ... it did not seem likely that there was much promising material for celebrities in Avonlea school; but you could never tell what might happen if a teacher used her influence for good. Anne had certain rosetinted ideals of what a teacher might accomplish if she only went the right way about it; and she was in the midst of a delightful scene, forty years hence, with a famous personage ... just exactly what he was to be famous for was left in convenient haziness, but Anne thought it would be rather nice to have him a college president or a Canadian premier ... bowing low over her wrinkled hand and assuring her that it was she who had first kindled his ambition, and that all his success in life was due to the lessons she had instilled so long ago in Avonlea school. This pleasant vision was shattered by a most unpleasant interruption.
'A demure little Jersey cow came scuttling down the lane and five seconds later Mr. Harrison arrived ... if "arrived" be not too mild a term to describe the manner of his irruption into the yard.
'He bounced over the fence without waiting to open the gate, and angrily confronted astonished Anne, who had risen to her feet and stood looking at him in some bewilderment....'