It's surprisingly hard to find out what the high temperature was yesterday, but New York 1 says it was over 100, so we'll go with that. "It's not as hot out there as it was yesterday, right?" asked the bartender at Todd Kliman's book reading last night. "Let me put it this way," I said, I guess in my old man gathered at the cracker barrel persona, "Tuesday I was home in air conditioning until evening, today I was walking all over Willamsburg. So for me today was much worse." (I did go out Tuesday night to a restaurant whose air conditioning was broken. But they turned a fan on us and the company was delightful, so we endured.)

As a result of the census scandal, I have been transferred to Brooklyn Northeast. Among my reasons for wanting to do census work was to learn more areas of Brooklyn, and mission accomplished on that. Yesterday I was in both the Marcy Projects and a Hasidic neighborhood. The PJs are generally easy to do because people are home during the day, but I was nervous about the Hasidim. For one thing, my whore elbows were showing.

But the one girl I interviewed was a sweetheart. Williamsburg hasn't gotten word of Mister Otis's invention, and I'd walked up to the fifth floor to find an empty apartment. (I now have a sixth census sense that tells me when there's someone home and I need to keep knocking.) I sat on the steps to catch my breath and fill out my paperwork which was soggy with sweat and heat sneezes, when this Missus X and her two toddlers came up the stairs. "I hope you live in ..." I said. She did, and she'd already been interviewed and didn't really want to talk to me, but said she'd come back out. I wondered if like most people who say that, she'd then try to duck me, but she came out a few minutes later and handed me a frozen lemonade thingy I'd never seen before. It's about the size of a wiener casing with a narrow waist, and you twist it in the middle and suck the sludge out of both pieces. It had no markings and I don't know if they buy them or make them at home or what, but it was delish and possibly saved my life. I must have looked pretty tragic by that point. "You can't see I am not home?" she asked. I said I did know, but thought I would wait a few minutes. (And when I say girl, I'm talking about someone who looked to be 18 and has two kids.) She gave me her family's names and I thanked her for that and the popsicle. "This is all, what you need?" she said, and I got a whisper that she was a little bit curious or bemused by me. But that was all what I needed, so on I went, north, into Hipster Williamsburg.

I had not planned to be out in the heat much at all, but because I didn't know my way around, I walked around for two hours, with two brief bus rides. We've had a bunch of news stories about how to tell if you're approaching heat stroke, and although sweat running down my legs was annoying, it told me I was alive. A doctor on the news said a third of the patients who get emergency care still die from heat stroke because once your body can't regulate its temperature, the organs start to fail. I pushed this envelope once in DC when I was squiring Leo and Harriet's nanny, Jeannette, around. I was hot, then hot and sweaty, then hot, sweaty, and cranky, then dry and goose-bumpy. The wind still felt hot, but I got goose bumps and no sweat. I really wanted Jeannette to see everything she wanted to see, and it was only a few minutes before we were in the car, but I'm older and wiser now. (About half an hour after we were in the car, I was suddenly sweating again.) For example, while I was waiting for a bus, I checked my pulse, which was over a hundred for no reason, so I sat on a stoop that was like what they cook tortillas on, but my pulse slowed down. And I drank even though I didn't feel thirsty. In the back of my mind, I knew Harold would be really pissed if I let myself die of heat stroke!