Weather
It’s been raining and raining and RAINING and effing blasphemative* raining for four or five days. I mean sure, we get wet stretches (when we’re not having a drought) but it’s unusual for me to find myself walking hellhounds in downpours day after day: there are usually breaks we manage to rush out in. Not lately. Yesterday was especially uncooperative and we got back to the car sullen, wet and cranky. Hellhounds get kind of nuts-more nuts I mean-when they’re soaked through, which happens way too easily with their silky whippet fur. If it looks like pis-I mean sheeting all day I will heave heavy put-upon sighs and resign myself to going out for a series of half hour sprints, half an hour being about the whippet-fur limit.**
Once months ago now (when I was younger and more gullible) I’d let myself believe a weather report which said it was going to clear off by the afternoon. By the time it manifestly was going to do nothing of the kind it was so late I had to take hellhounds out for an hour or have new large hairy*** dangling ceiling ornaments for the evening. I took them out for an hour. And they came back pretty well traumatised by Falling Wet Stuff even though it wasn’t all that cold, merely relentless. My Gore-Tex had soaked through too****. It was after we’d got indoors and had a Rubbing Down Party, but were still feeling rather twitchy and hyper, when the famous occasion on which Darkness leaped from across the kitchen into my lap occurred. Granted this kitchen is not very large, still, the dog crate is nearly hip high-I mean my hip-and it was in the way. I haven’t done that again-neither has Darkness-we go for our sprints instead. And I wash millions of wet muddy towels afterward. Sigh. But at the moment I’m running out of towels.
I’ve got so much wet muddy gear hanging on and around the Aga it’s hard to get a pot or a pan anywhere near it. I’m going to have to sacrifice my peace of mind again some day soon too and wash a lot of Converse All Stars. If I’m wearing pink sneakers, I want the world to know they’re pink. This will, however, cause the washing machine to shed tiny pinhead specks of dirt on all other laundry for weeks afterward. The meteorologists keep telling us it’s going to clear up. I’m sure. Before or after Mt Ararat disappears under the waves? Although I do hear rumours of sightings of sunlight all around us. Rain, rain go away, come again some other day . . .
* No, no, not the same thing as blasphemous at all. Blasphemative carries the clear implication of attracting behaviour that will cause blasphemy.
** Give me a blizzard any day. My Maine-bred whippet didn’t even need a coat till she got old. You just don’t leave a whippet outdoors in a New England winter. But whippets (and whippet crosses like my hellhounds) are such voluptuaries that I hate to think of any of them anywhere but in the house curled up in nests made of amazing numbers of blankets^ and a few sofa cushions from sofas that have gone to the great furniture warehouse in the sky. And eyeing the furniture (if they happen to have a spare eye open). I make temptation, on the subject of furniture, very difficult to yield to, but they are extremely talented lookers. Neither of the current generation however has yet developed Holly’s talent for balancing a laptop on her back.^^ When I bought my first handbag^^^-sized laptop it hadn’t occurred to me it was also going to revolutionize my life in terms of Time on Sofa with Dogs.
^ Which will then clog your washing machine with amazing amounts of dog hair. I have a new theory. The phenomenal quantities of dog hair that come off a dog-bed blanket are not produced by the dogs. There is a CHEMICAL REACTION when warm canine comes in contact with human-engineered fabric and from this comes the cascades of loose hair.+ This leaves the dogs themselves free to concentrate on producing shed hair to silt up the corners++ and drift attractively in bars of sunlight, especially when you have a client or your mother-in-law visiting.
+ Possibly from another dimension. The chemical reaction may merely be the Opening of the Gateway to the Dog Hair Dimension. Didn’t Clifford Simak write a story-?
++ I keep thinking there ought to be a way to organise this so that would gather in a nice foot-warming pouf under the kitchen table. But I haven’t figured out the magic words yet.
^^ Yes, I know about lap desks. You either have the thing cranked up under your chin, which is less than practical, let alone optimum, or if you have the kind that sits on little legs as for breakfast in bed, in the first place it’s probably too wide to stay on a sofa and in the second place if you’ve managed to wedge it in somehow the first time your canine companion, having wormed his or her way up underneath it because that’s what canine companions do, tries to rearrange position and discovers that the ceiling is a lot lower than had registered . . . it tends to be upsetting to all parties. I haven’t quite lost a laptop to Dog Eruption yet . . . but I don’t want to.
^^^ large handbag
*** Speaking of hairy
**** Which it tells you in the fine print it will do, after the clerk has told you it won’t.