9:19am The hot weather has returned. I realize with gratitude that I began this journey after the last heatwave ended, making the cooking much more manageable. What’s happened in the interval is that eating only the kitcheree seems to have enabled me to tolerate the high temps better than I had been. We’ll see if that remains true after several days of promised upper 90 degree days. Today I will likely have the opportunity to jump into a lake, which will be most welcome!

This morning I had the first inkling of a feeling that one more bowl of kitcheree would be the bowl too many! It was a little unnerving but I was pretty sure that if I actually waited until hunger hit, such thoughts would either leave me or become irrelevant. Both things happened. Once I got hungry, kitcheree looked mighty good to me. And the fact that there’s nothing else I’m going to eat for the next 17 days removes it as a discussion item. When I had the thought that I couldn’t possibly look at anther bowl of kitcheree, it’s not that I was longing for something else. It may well have been that I just am not feeling so great today and eating anything at all was the issue. I don’t have much experience with loss of appetite, so I wouldn’t know it even if it introduced itself to me by name. But I’m interested to explore the parameters of this thing called “appetite:” an unanticipated stop along the way of this Camino I’m on.

The “not feeling so great today” started with waking up in the night with a headache that I associate with overeating the things that don’t really work so well for me: chips, wheat, sugar — all the things I’ve been totally clear of for these 23 days. It remains a mystery what caused the headache.