Rain, rain, go away . . .
. . . come again some other day/ Rabid hellhounds want to play. And if they don’t get to play sometime soon, rabid hellgoddess will lose her final dissolving fragments of sanity.**
The problem is that I get just as fidgety as they do, but I take it out in snarling.*** Yesterday was what passes in my universe as a good-energy day, but as often happens with the ME-deranged system, the pedal then stuck floored.† I was up way late digging through accumulated OIDTT†† and when I finally got to bed the wheels wouldn’t stop spinning.†††
Today, therefore, has not been one of the great days of my life. AND THEN IT STARTED RAINING. What is this, a contest? The winds were all hanging out at the pub called the Global Weather Systems and someone said, Hey, I bet I can put southern England under water before you finish your pint, and someone else said, you’re on.
. . . Chaos got up and cruised through the kitchen yet again looking like a shark checking out a beach party. Once he focussed on the inevitable victim however he came and stood at my chair, joggling my elbow and looking tragic. Stop that. Having oppressed him into lying down again I went to the front door and flung it open, feeling fairly tragic myself. We’d had three walks this afternoon so far: the first lasted about three minutes, the second five, and the third . . . pretty nearly ten. We can turn around as soon as you crap, I kept saying to them every time they tried to make a bolt for home.‡ Mission was finally accomplished and we came indoors and used up three towels.
. . . It’s not raining. It’s not raining. I slam the door shut and shout to Peter, It’s not raining! –Come on, guys! And immediately the hall is teeming with hellhounds.‡‡
I think about the monster I’ve created sometimes. Sighthounds tend to be 90 mph for ten or twenty minutes once or twice a day, and crashed out the other twenty three hours and twenty.‡‡‡ And there are days—hot summer days for example—when we’re clearly out there for me, not for them. But through a combination of guilt for having too small a garden(s) for anything bigger than a Yorkshire terrier to run around in, a naturally cranky and fidgety temperament, and a menopausally stressed constitution which has decided that breathing is fattening, I have trained these hellhounds to believe that they need to be out there stamping the ground into place two hours a day. Every day. Rain, shine, hail, plagues of locusts.
We got our final half hour in. In fact we got thirty-five minutes. And it didn’t start raining again till we were coming back down the long drive to the mews. And hellhounds promptly ate their dinner and have been horizontal for the rest of the evening.
Whew.
But it’s supposed to rain even more tomorrow.
* * *
* Say, in March. Oh, all right, February.^
^ ‘ . . . For some ridiculous reason, to which, however, I’ve no desire to be disloyal,
Some person in authority, I don’t know who, very like the Astronomer Royal,
Has decided that, although for such a beastly month as February,
twenty eight days as a rule are plenty, . . .’
http://math.boisestate.edu/GaS/pirates/web_op/pirates18.html
The photos are huge fun but I do not recommend the midi files.
** Chaos, if you get up and fester around the house again I am^ going to lock you in the car.
^ Word wants this to be is. I is agonna lock youse+ in dah cah. —Tell me again where Microsoft does its recruiting?
+ I know, youse is usually plural, like you-all. Chaos in ceiling-dangling mode is plural. When they’re both at it there are at least six of them, and they all have extra legs.
*** It was only louring this morning so we did manage our first walk of the day. Setting out from the edge of town we caught up with a little old man tottering along with his lion-sized Labrador—one of those great square creatures with a skull as flat as a caryatid’s. It started leaping around in a leaden sort of way at our approach, and its owner—or anyway its walker—wrestled it into the undergrowth by the side of the path and awaited our passing by. Flathead was making a noise similar to the sound I’ve been making off and on for about the last five (wet) hours. Little old man in a little thready voice says: he doesn’t like dogs coming up behind him. He wants to play.
Sure he does, Henry. You just snub his lead round that nice tree, and hang on.
† ME as a form of misplaced blu-tack. Some days it glues your head to the desk.
†† Oh I’ll Do That Tomorrow. There is a subdivision to this grouping: AAAAAUGH. Which is an acronym for AAAAAUGH.
††† I’d stopped work relatively early in the evening when I could feel my creative powers fusing^ which meant in this case in the middle of the final cliffhanger scene when The End of the World As She Has Known It is bearing down on Sylvi, which was not contributing to my peace of mind. Rocs are bad guys in the PEGASUS universe, and there’s a roc. You really don’t want to go to bed worrying about rocs.
I finished that scene today.^^ Whimper. I talked to Merrilee tonight^^^ and among other tedious professional matters we were discussing the schedule for getting PEGASUS in (we hope) for publication next autumn. I was saying that I was going to have to start in again on PEG II immediately, and was planning to begin while I was waiting ( . . . we hope . . . ) for the copyedited manuscript of PEG I to return to me. In context this sounded like a sober, responsible^^^^ author getting on conscientiously with the next item of business. In fact it’s because I can’t bear to leave Sylvi there at the end of PEG I.
^ Into a sort of earthy, organic wodge like an early Henry Moore reject.
^^ Tick that off the list. Tomorrow comes shoehorning.
^^^ Merrilee has taken the Twitter plunge. The Luddites are falling fast.
^^^^ In need of money to pay off her Third House. Did I say responsible? Isn’t there an implication of sanity and good judgement about ‘responsible’? +
+ Poor Third House. I was finally going to put it in order when I sent PEGASUS in. Not to mention the thirty rose-bushes that will be arriving any minute, now that it’s November. All right I still am going to put it in order when I send PEGASUS in.^ I’ll just mutter to myself more.
^ And plant thirty rose-bushes.
‡ Once upon a time they’d do their thing on command. But I got lazy, because we go for these whopping great walks anyway^, and the truth is they’re too busy hating the weather to listen when it’s raining, and after the first six months or so of continual digestive disaster when they were puppies I stopped trying to take them anywhere. And now we’re out of practise.
^ I’m always fascinated by the paragraphs in the dog-training books that tell you not to turn around the minute your dog does what you have him out there to do, because you’re teaching him that the longer he holds on the longer a walk he’ll get. Er, what?
‡‡ As I say, it’s six of them when they get wound up. With extra legs.
‡‡‡ Yes I know they’re not all like this. But the greyhound as the 45 mph couch potato is a cliché.
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