June 30, 2009

Hysterical

 

None of the emails I’ve sent in the last two days went out.  Did you get that?  None of the emails I’ve sent in the last two days went out.

I got suspicious when I had an email from Merrilee wanting to know why I wasn’t answering the phone at the cottage when I’d emailed her this morning to please ring me at the mews.  So I went investigating the back cupboards of Outlook, because it won’t tell you these things,  and . . .

None of the messages I’ve sent in the last two days had gone out.  They’re all sitting there with the same FRELLING error message. 

This might make a jolly sparkling uproarious blog post . . . if I were in the frelling mood.  But I’m not.  Can you say ‘really really really bad day’?

It’s still hot.

Tomorrow, you know, the day I’m supposed to be going to the opera, is still on to be The Hottest Day of the Year.  I haven’t been to the Grange before, so I don’t know just how outdoors it all is, but I do know it’s based around another of these big old country houses open to the public, this one more of a literal wreck than usual—Peter and I went there once, when it was still just a romantic ruin—but those are certainly tents people are eating under, in the photo on the opening screen, and you park in a field*, so there’s quite a lot of outdoors involved.**

. . . But this is when it starts getting interesting.

We had a hot slow dawdle this morning.  We have had hot slow dawdles before.  I’m terrible in the heat.  The hellhounds are worse.  What was it Robert Frost said about the world ending in ice rather than fire?***  The hellhounds are from that place.  But we’ve had hot slow dawdles before.  Today Darkness came home, lay down for a while . . . and then threw up five times in an hour† and when taken outdoors, which is what he seemed to be requesting—at which point I figured the news was about to get even worse than mopping the floor five times††—had the streaming yellow squirts.

There’s a short loop around the mews, out to the road and curl around through another bit of the old estate, and back onto the mews drive again.  I don’t do it very often because it’s only about a ten minute walk, and the hellhounds and I specialize in distance.  But in this case I thought we’d come back that way.  Today as we turned onto the curl we were sharply addressed by an ugly old woman with one of those faces that brings to mind what your kindergarten teacher used to say to you when you were sulking, What if your face froze like that?  This nasty old cow’s face did.  And she told me we were on private property.  Now, I’m quite capable of walking on dubiously unpublic property, but usually only if I know the farmer or it’s one of those places everyone does walk and you figure there’s safety in numbers.  This was genuinely news to me.  But we live at the mews, I said, nonplussed—the gate opens on the drive.  The gate is for our private guests only, snarled the old bat.  I was extremely sorry that Darkness did not choose that moment to have another yellow squirt.  Preferably over her shoes.

It was after this that I got back to the mews, was wondering why Merrilee wasn’t ringing me, got her message, and . . .

To sum up.  I have various people mad at me for yelling at them.†††  My email is working again, for the moment:  apparently‡ Outlook had decided—nine months or whatever it is since Blogmom set up @robinmckinley.com—that it wanted authorization.  It didn’t tell me it wanted authorization or anything:  it just stopped sending my emails, and kept its error message hidden close to its chest.  I believe ‡‡ I have resent all the blocked emails—including one or two that will probably make more people mad at me for being late, and for not realizing that the fact they hadn’t answered meant that they can’t have got mine.  I hate organized people.   I’m supposed to notice someone hasn’t answered by return electron? 

Have I mentioned that it’s still hot?

And Darkness still has the streaming yellows.  I have my hellhound minder lined up for tomorrow night and everything—and Peter has said he’ll cancel bridge and stay home if that would help—but if Darkness is no better tomorrow, I won’t be going to the opera.  I’ll be at home shooting electrolytes down his throat.  And damning the universe.  Anyone thinking of contacting me about anything, you might want to wait at least till after tomorrow’s blog entry, unless perhaps you’d like to join in a chorus of universe-damning. . . .

* * *

* They want you to dress as if . . . you were going to Buckingham Palace to see your husband gonged.  What are you supposed to do about your shoes?  Hire a footman to carry your pink diamante heels^ to the door of the theatre, and take your plimsolls back to the car?  

^ I wish.  

** Especially for anyone foolish enough to be going alone.  There is no provision for loners at this lovely-evening-out-opera-experience.  For frell’s sake, I can’t be the only person who is an opera nut and/or within (relatively) easy driving distance and who, at those prices, doesn’t want to drag a husband or a friend along merely to save herself from the Awful Stigma of Being Seen Alone in a Public Place Having a Good Time?  You can’t book a single seat at a table;  you can’t order a meal for one;  you can’t even order a picnic for one;  they don’t sell champagne by the glass—or even by the half bottle, although it still takes me two days to get through a half bottle unless Peter helps—but they’ll sell you a single ticket for an extreme amount of money and you’ve still got something like an hour and half’s interval to eat your supper in.  I feel like the little match girl.^  I am planning to go back to Wolfgang (in my plimsolls) and eat a pack of Organic Roast Cashews, which are my idea of hard rations, and almost worth eating supper in a car to have an excuse for^^.  I am debating taking a quarter bottle of champagne in an ice bucket in an insulated cool bag.

^ Only hotter.  Dying in the snow right now sounds pretty good.

^^ But not very often, in these menopausal days, when half a cashew is at least an eighth of a pound on the scales the next morning.

*** http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/fire-and-ice/

† At which point I rang the vet, who said wipe his feet in cold water to help him cool off.

†† Four times.  I didn’t get there fast enough the fifth time, and he threw up in his bed.

††† And the even more distressing truth is that I don’t care as much as I should.  I wasn’t blaming them.  I was damning the universe.  I am fifty-six years old and have regrettably little self control?  Fine.  Anything you like.    

‡ According to Computer Men, who are among those who are mad at me. 

‡‡ But belief is a chancy freller

June 30, 2009 | Filed Under violent 

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