On balance
It’s raining, which is a good thing, as I wasn’t going to be able to put off a comprehensive plant-pot-watering much longer even in cool October . . . and I suppose it’s also a good thing for bringing on the arrival of my big tulip order.* This is the line ‘em out and poke ‘em in order, long queues of pots and disappearing bags of compost . . . I’m going to need more netting. And I caught a mouse, poor stupid little beggar. Don’t eat tulip bulbs in my garden, you’ll live longer.
Walking hellhounds in the rain is always a bad thing however. Including the way they tear around the house afterward, up the walls, over you and the piano, between the sofa and piles of boooooooooooks: CRASH.
Much worse news is that Computer Man Central got broken into, and thousands of pounds of kit were ripped off.** The knock on effect is that they’re up to their eyeballs in coppers*** and our chat about simplifying my life and recovering my forum from the dustheap therefore has been put off. Sob. Meanwhile . . . I’m just about managing to read the blog-entry threads, between random crashes, but even copying and pasting raises the crash level to avalanche†. At the moment I’m assuming that I’ll have the mother and father of all catch-ups when I’m finally fit to boogie again, but it had better happen soon.
And then . . . the dentist. I feel that I didn’t really set you up sufficiently last week, when I told you that Dentist from R’lyeh†† has horses and that we had bonded††† at last. This is the dentist who kept me waiting forty minutes without explanation and got shirty when I objected. This is the dentist that when, pretty well out of my tree with the pain of a second emergency root canal tooth, the first one having only happened a few weeks before, I said that I didn’t know how much more I could stand, he said, I can only do what I can do, and if that’s not good enough then maybe you had better go elsewhere. This is the dentist responsible for drugging me to the eyeballs with a sedative‡, the result of which being I fell down the next day and broke my hand. This is not, I acknowledge, strictly his fault, but it still clusters round him as part of his entourage. This is also the dentist it costs £1000 to walk across the threshold of.‡‡
Etc.
I’d rather bond with Cthulhu.‡‡‡
Maybe I have.
Anyway. He’d said he’d bring photos of his fancy eventing mare and he forgot. What! I said. Okay, I’m leaving now. But he just happened to have one photo about his person . . . This is a very, very, very nice mare. I mean, she’s being seriously evented by a British Olympic team rider, she is a very, very, very nice mare. But I wouldn’t necessarily care that she was worth £1,000,000,000 if she wasn’t my type. Only she is my type. She’s just my type. She’s a (mostly) TB/ID (thoroughbred/Irish Draught) cross, which is pretty much my dream-horse cross§, and she’s got the beautiful TB head. She’s even a bay. And the Dentist from R’lyeh has her.
At least I get to ride Connie tomorrow. Connemara/TB is a dream-horse cross too.
* * *
* You too will have noticed that mail order plants tend to arrive on days or in weeks when you can’t possibly deal with them due to brain surgery, pirates, etc. Rain. Dentists.
** And no, I wasn’t even tempted to say ‘this is karma for having left me with an avalanching forum.’ All my computer men have kids to raise and they all have photos of their children on their mobile phones.
*** the fuzz, the boys and girls in blue, bobbies, bluecoats, finest, the law
† Yes, whatever it is, is getting worse
†† [T]he nightmare corpse-city of R’lyeh … was built in measureless eons behind history by the vast, loathsome shapes that seeped down from the dark stars. There lay great Cthulhu and his hordes, hidden in green slimy vaults . . . until the end.
-H. P. Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu“
R’lyeh has its own Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R’lyeh
††† AAAAEEEEEEE, approximately, which I believe is the appropriate expression for someone about to be engulfed by a vast loathsome shape from a dark star
‡ Which I still don’t understand. I don’t want to be sedated I want pain killers that work.
‡‡ Which is of course why he can afford horses.
‡‡‡ Does Cthulhu keep horses?
§ Okay, one of my dream-horse crosses. My dressage champion dream horse has a lot of Andalusian blood. I will point out in a small voice that IDs are supposed to have some Spanish genes.
comments
Please join the discussion at Robin McKinley's Web Forum.