Now Playing: Sufjan Stevens, "Amazing Grace."

Elizabeth visited yesterday. We sat outside on the back porch for an hour or so, and she told me all about the RPM team to Covenant Fellowship that she's been leading for the last month-and-a-half. Lots of great stories about inner-city Pittsburgh people...! Scott cooked dinner for us, and then he, Laura, Elizabeth, and I walked down to the Chocolate Moose for ice cream. We met a bunch of people there--Mary, Mallory, Eric, and Olivia--and sat in the park with our ice cream, by a fountain, under the brilliant three-quarters moon. Elizabeth and I talked all about Cyprus.

Today the weather is still cool and clear. It feels as though I'm back up at Horn Creek, or in Northern Ireland on one of its best days. A green hummingbird keeps visiting the zinnias on our back porch. It zooms up to look in the back door, then zooms to the zinnias, then to the lantanas, its tail scintillating as it hovers.

Tonight we're watching TTT EE and eating Chinese food! Ah, these final lovely days of summer.... I finished Have His Carcase earlier this week and started Excellent Women, a novel written in the 1950s by a British novelist, Barbara Pym, and recommended to me by Syneva. It's a bittersweet read, told from the perspective of a single middle-aged woman in the shadow of WWII. Like Jane Austen, but more melancholy.