Another Way To Keep Cool, or Another Thing I Enjoy About My Apartment

We have a window in our bathroom. We had one in our last bathroom, too, but this one is inside the shower. I thought it was annoying until I found it open one morning. My roommate had opened it before I got up and he'd left before I noticed it was open. I didn't know why he did this: he just decided the bathroom needed to be a little cooler from the night air, he had a particularly smelly session with the toilet and decided that a draft might take away the unpleasantry... I don't know, but I told myself I was going to close it when I took a shower myself. We're trying to keep the cool air we hoarde nightly inside. It's common sense to keep the bathroom window closed. When I did get into the shower, though, I found that window to be a miraculous thing.

Why, it's just a window. Who cares? Ah, but do you know the feeling of coolness on a hot day when you get out of the pool? How suddenly the air isn't oppresively hot, but rather chilly? That's what it feels like, only I'm never in a rush to get dry. The window is small, the water is hot, and a tree greens the view and makes it even cooler. No one can see me because the window only goes down to my neck. And when the water is off and the shower door is open, there's none of that steamy after-shower heat that I love in the winter; the bathroom door is open and the lights are all off. It creates a small draft through the door and out that screened invention in housing framework. I'm blessedly cool until I get dressed.

Beauty and Sarah

I enjoyed this; more the first half before the writer gets too engulfed in "look at my travel pictures". This essay on beauty made me think of my favorite book, which I re-read for the year this month, and then went to a book club with a bunch of other girls who also loved it.

It's still as good as it was five or six years ago when my best friend, Sarah, came to church and told me, "We're going on a trip to the bookstore; you have to buy this book. My family and I think it's totally you." The bookstore trip was enjoyable; I did buy the book when she led me straight to it, if not a little hesitantly. I'm proud to say I have pleasant memories of Sarah and her impeccable doodles in church, her poems during lessons, and our serious discussions about boys. I'm happy to say she isn't lost in the crowd of friends I've made and forgotten. She's one of those silent lurkers of this journal. It feels right, considering she's read so many of my journal entries of the past. I would come to church and hand her my journal, open to a specific entry, and tell her to read during the meeting. She did; she made her own notes in it as well, comments on what had just happened to me. Her handwriting is beloved.