Life Enhancing Activities
I need fewer.
And don’t anyone say to me, for example, fencing*, knitting**, drawing*** or studying French†, all of which I’ve done and then let slip through my buttery fingers.
But I don’t want to give anything up! No, no, no, that is not the answer!
Maybe I should start keeping a list. Okay, today I . . . shot out of bed at 8 to hustle hellhounds out for their morning walk before I met Vicky on the top of the bell tower, her to take St George’s flag down†† and me to take advantage of her going up on the roof to take photos. Yes! Photos! Stay tuned! Then I ran home again to change into britches and hare off to my riding lesson, a day early this week because Jenny is playing a tennis tournament tomorrow. The riding lesson itself is only half an hour††† and Jenny’s yard is about five minutes away. Tell me why Connie always takes at least an hour and a half?‡
I had maybe two hours at my desk, one doing boring stuff and one doing homeopathy, and then I came down to the mews for lunch, bringing the paperback proofs of DRAGONHAVEN with me . . . and promptly spent an hour trying to figure out the best fingering for Song II . . . and I’m not even finished! I’m also still dubbing around with the introduction! Oisin, drat him, suggested that the ‘drumming’ chords would be better two-note rather than three-note, but that gives an entirely different rhythm (duh) and I keep changing my mind about how to fit it back into the rest.
Then I read far too few pages of proofs.
Then I went up to Third House, where, yaaaaaaay!, either Garden Man had finally been there or the elves had, and the great swathe of the long border‡‡ that was a malevolent jungle of ground elder and bindweed is all magically clear and beautiful.‡‡‡ So I whomped in three delphiniums which were exceedingly unhappy in their pots, despite the fact I had potted them on not that many weeks ago, waiting for Garden Man to get to me and Third House on his list.
At which point I had spent more than enough time in the healthy invigorating outdoors§ and I could barely totter after hellhounds for their final walk, although they, having spent my delphinium-planting time playing Tyrannosaurus Rex vs Godzilla, were uncharacteristically willing to totter with me.
Then I went back to the cottage and watered a lot of pots.§§
Then I came back down to the mews for supper, and I seem to be blogging. Now I am going to read proofs.
Although I bet you I go play the piano some more. . . .
* * *
* There’s a sign I drive by at least once a week that says Southern Fencing. I’ve lived in this area for eighteen years and I still, fractionally, startle, every time I see it, while my mind leaps delightedly to the wrong conclusion. Thank the gods it’s the wrong conclusion. See: I need fewer.
** I so get the yarn thing. I so get the yarn thing I don’t dare read, for example, http://www.yarnharlot.ca/blog/
http://www.yarnharlot.ca/blog/archives/2004/06/02/feet_treat.html
http://www.yarnharlot.ca/blog/archives/2007/08/01/kauni_questions.html (Note: eeeeek.)
http://www.yarnharlot.ca/blog/archives/2007/06/23/practically_a_cedar_closet.html
because there are all these photos and she writes so well and it’s about knitting. When I was first musing (if you call banging your head against a wall and screaming ‘musing’) on the possibility of starting a blog a knitting friend recommended yarnharlot as a really good example of what can be done with a blog, and it is. It’s just . . . knitting. If I had a second pair of hands I could knit while I blogged, but . . . hmm . . . Ah ha! The Moment for Voice Recognition Software! –Snork!
And even our own jmeadows is dangerous:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/69585952@N00/1436364422/in/set-72157603342951724/
(I have a pink thing)
http://jodimeadows.com/yarn_wordpress/
She has a yarn blog for pity’s sake. How . . . uh . . . committed is that.
Scroll down and look at her spindle. Oh gods! It’s not just knitting! You have to spin too! Now I want a spindle! It’s so pretty! I just barely learnt to use a drop spindle when I was writing SPINDLE’S END, to find out what you did with your hands, how it felt. What I thought I was going to use this for fell out of the finished book of course–almost all my so-called research always does, book after book, like all the bee reading I did for CHALICE. It’s all gone. Feh.
And speaking of thready handwork, I also used to embroider. I believe my first project may have been ‘Burt Lancaster’ in purple satin stitch on a pillow case. (I think I only did one. Memory, perhaps mercifully, fails to record what I did with its pair.) I was, uh, thirteen maybe? Everybody else I knew was mad for the Beatles. Ah well. But I have lately somehow managed to get on the mailing list of these people:
http://www.ehrmantapestry.com/
http://www.ehrmantapestry.com/detail.cfm?ID=933
Want! Want want want want want want!
http://www.ehrmantapestry.com/detail.cfm?ID=451
http://www.ehrmantapestry.com/detail.cfm?ID=156
These are even on sale!
(Oh . . . ratbags. I’ve just been trying these links, and they’re a little hinky. Once you’ve chosen your monetary unit you should be able to click through. Or the home page opens okay, if you’re interested, and the other three, if they don’t open for you directly, are Rosa Gallica, Illuminated Manuscript, and Renaissance Heart.)
*** I always thought it would be drawing I got back to, not music! I can’t sing, I can’t play the piano, and until about six months ago I was in happy ignorance of the fact that I would love composing, if I ever tried it! Also, drawing is quiet! I don’t have to worry about annoying the neighbours! And I can draw a little! Well, maybe sort of!
† I took years of French in school. Years and years. I started in junior high, laboured with it through high school, and took it as my foreign language distribution requirement in college. And I still cannot write, speak, or read it, although I can read it a little. I am embarrassed to be one of those ugly, up my own wazoo Americans who can only speak English because English is the only language anyone needs to bother with, and I also hate waste: all those classroom hours! All that hideous homework! I had to write papers in French! Once when Peter and I were in Paris, quite a few years ago, I bought four or half a dozen children’s books that I knew really really well–THE BLACK STALLION and A LITTLE PRINCESS among them–and settled grimly down back home with my French dictionary, to read them, which still seems to me a rather sensible way to go about it. . . . Um. I think I made them Go Away when we moved out of the old house. They may be lurking horribly in the attic of Third House, waiting to pounce. One of the ways I managed to bond with Jake, writing DRAGONHAVEN, is that neither of us is good at languages.
†† There’s a whole complex church calendar of when you fly whatever, mostly St George
††† A very intense half hour
‡ Have I told you that someone wants to buy Horse-for-sale? His vetting was last week. No it wasn’t. He came in from the field lame, and Jenny scowled at his feet and decided that one of his shoes had slipped. Ah, thoroughbred feet. So delightful. Show me a thoroughbred with good, big, sound, regular feet, and I’ll show you a crossbred. So the farrier came, Jenny put off the vetting, he has been perfectly square and sound the last several days, the buyer rang up and said the vetting was rescheduled for Thursday, and he promptly came in from the field a little ‘ouchy’ again. And there’s no nonsense about Jenny: if he fails he fails, and if he passes and then goes lame a fortnight later, she’ll take him back. I think she’s about to have a nice school horse. Heh heh heh heh heh. Because he’ll stay absolutely sound the minute he knows he’s not for sale.
‡‡ I have a Long Border too, just like the Royal Horticultural Society’s flagship garden, or Sissinghurst, or Great Dixter, or Famous Garden of Choice. Long is relative.
‡‡‡ Although it will be again, because you can’t get rid of either merely by digging. You can beat them back a little is all. And the situation is complicated by the fact that they’re both coming through in vast Gordian knots under the fence from next door’s garden. I took another bucketful of evil twisty roots out just in the process of digging three holes. The bindweed roots are especially evil: up near the surface they’re little wee things and break easily. A few inches down they turn into hawsers. And the hawsers will go on sending up bindweed till the sun goes nova.
§ How do farmers stand all that fresh air?
§§ It’s finally supposed to rain tomorrow night. We live in hope.
Water
It has not been one of my better days.
It began, as my days so often do, yesterday. Or very early this morning: 1:30, approximately, when I went to run a bath and discovered I had no water.
And that began about a fortnight ago now, when they started digging up the road east of here. But a fortnight ago they were still safely out of town, on the road to the next little village. But they immediately started jackhammering their way back toward us again, and they arrived last Friday, so all this week it has been a total fricking nightmare this end of town. I think I’ve done some ranting about the way people blithely park on the double yellow line* on our piece of the road, which is mostly residential. Our road is also narrower than it is once you reach the centre of town, which is to say our road is two lanes wide, full stop. The shoulders are the vertical banks previously referred to, which Wolfgang and I had to climb a few days ago to get out of the way of a rampaging SUV which thought I was trying to get away with something. I was, I was trying to turn up my little cul de sac from a single traffic lane, which is all we’ve got at the moment. Since extra-large vehicles–troop carriers, perhaps, or tanks, or ground helicopter transport, disguised as passenger cars and painted in this year’s fashion colours–commonly park, as I say, on our double yellow lines, I should be accustomed to negotiating the merciless turn in and out of my cul de sac** while unable to see a blind bit of what’s coming in either direction. But it’s a funny thing, I am not accustomed, and I object, and furthermore there’s been increasing amounts of Large Paraphernalia hither and thither in both directions occupying even more space than the (lengthening) stretch they’re digging up, which means the extent of the single lane is stretching and stretching too, and the whole situation is too migraineworthy for words. Especially the prospect of their coming back again next week, which, since they’ve left all their toys behind, obviously they are going to.
Yesterday I was blazing back to the cottage to drop hellhounds off on my way to my piano lesson . . . and discovered I had no water. I ambled gently and nonchalantly down to the foot of my street and observed that some of the bozos in current occupation were wearing Southern Water logos so I attack–I mean I addressed one politely and he said oh, yeah, they’d turned it off, they’d turn it back on again in a little while.*** I didn’t have time to stay and chat† so I accepted this and shot off for my piano lesson.†† Friday afternoons are always a blur, and Peter was not playing bridge, so I went down to the mews after bell ringing practise. So I didn’t get home till . . . when I usually get home. And shortly thereafter discovered I had no water.
There were words. Hellhounds opened their eyes to check it had nothing to do with them.††† I found an old water bill and phoned the effing 24-hour emergency service and spoke to a surprisingly alert-sounding woman who did not deny that Southern Water had been mucking about on my street but said mildly that there were no reported problems. There are now, I replied. She promised to send someone round at 9 o’clock which I accepted gracefully, but it didn’t do a lot for my bath.
I didn’t sleep very well last night, for some reason. Something about the adrenaline spike getting stuck, perhaps.
But the water engineer was here at 9:05 and promptly went down in a sea of hellhounds. Fighting his way to the surface again he asked where the stopcock was, a question that had already exercised me somewhat, especially after the surprisingly alert woman had suggested I turn it off and on again to dislodge anything that was blocking my pipe, and I couldn’t find it. He eventually did, but had to take everything out of my under-sink cupboard first‡, where it was discovered in the farthest diagonal rear corner, and furthermore down a hole, where he couldn’t get his spanner‡‡ in the beggar.
Time passed. Only the hellhounds were happy.
I’m not sure how he finally mastered the thing. A small, trained, obedient goblin, perhaps. But at least I have water. Although given the amount of crud still coming through, I’m going to emerge from my bath tonight cinnamon-coloured‡‡‡ and I have no idea when I’ll be able to wash the white sheets from Wednesday Friend’s bed. Obviously if I weren’t a lazy slut I’d've done it already.
And that was only the beginning. But I want to go to bed now and read more of The Graveyard Book. And try not to get blood on anything.
* * *
* Ie, no parking
** Which is itself barely one lane wide, with brick-and-flint walls bordering both sides, in the uncompromising and inelastic way of brick and flint. Delivery trucks get stuck up here occasionally, which is always exciting.
*** Just as a matter of carefree curiosity what happens to, say, your washing machine, if it’s running and the water is suddenly turned off? Does it burn any of its bits out or anything?
† Nor did I have time to do running mad with an axe properly. Starting with the fact that I only have a hatchet for breaking up kindling.^
^ Hmm. Maybe I’ll get an axe for Third House, where there’s space for a woodpile, and room to swing an axe. And then it would be available for situations like these.
†† Where my cunning plan to play Name That Tune, my arrangement being rather successful, was slightly foiled by Oisin’s never having heard of Gypsy Rover. Gods, the man has such effing refined taste. He probably doesn’t even know who Led Zeppelin is. Or Peter, Paul and Mary. The only folk songs he knows are ones that Benjamin Effing Britten set. And he got them from Beethoven. Or possibly Haydn. Feh.
††† Or wasn’t the start of a promising new game. The auditory cues were inhibiting but the leaping around was hopeful.
‡ You don’t want to know. But he seems to think I hoard plastic bags. But he liked the hellhounds, so I forgive him calumnies on my personal habits.
‡‡ wrench
‡‡‡ Hey! Great! I can never get a tan!
Hello folks
Hello folks, Robin’s second American guest here.
Robin was kind enough to pick me up at the station despite my having called her Tuesday night to say I’d be in at 3:30….. then again today to tell her I’d missed my train from Bangor and the subsequent re-routing of my ticket would result in my arriving at 5:30, not 3:30….then AGAIN from the platform in London to say I’d managed to catch a slightly earlier train on the last leg and I’d be arriving at 5. I wouldn’t have blamed her a bit if she’d just left me on the platform awaiting a return train. But she did pick me up, and didn’t throw me out of the car in retribution for all the time changes, and I’ve arrived more or less intact.*
As it happened, the late arrival meant that I’m in turn staying longer than originally planned. This led to two consequences; one you’re reading right now–I get to guest blog. Huzzah! And two, I got to go to Wednesday bell practice.
Do you play bridge? Because I don’t, and yet I sometimes read the bridge column in the paper for my own amusement just because it’s such complete gibberish–dummies and ruffles and clubbing your spades and all that kind of thing. Trying to follow what was going on in change ringing, beyond “Hmm, these people appear to be ringing some bells,” is similarly utterly indecipherable to the unindoctrinated. The ringing master keeps shouting out what seem like completely random words and phrases, and despite my best efforts to pay attention I only had a slightly better grasp of what he was talking about after than I did before. I did know, from reading Robin’s blog, that the ringers follow one another, and that who they follow relates to what pattern they’re ringing. So I decided to watch the fellow across from where I was sitting and see where he was looking. This turned out to be more of a challenge than I’d anticipated, as that particular fellow had a slight cast in one eye and I couldn’t for the life of me tell who he was actually looking at. So that was a wash. But the extreme high point was getting to climb up into the tower and see the bells themselves (you can’t from where they’re ringing, the ropes go right up into the ceiling) and then having a go at pulling a rope myself. Wild Robert was kind enough to run me through the basic parts of ringing a huge-ass bell, and it was pretty fabulous if I do say so. Next time I’ll have to show up for sacred home tower practice on a Friday. Though next time I might just have to abandon the train and hire a car….**
* * *
* This is the POLITE version. I got this email from her like ten days ago saying, hi, I’m coming to England this week, want to meet up? And I’m: yo, woman, you couldn’t have given me WARNING? Naah. Warning wasn’t in the plan.^ Blah. Phooey. So, she says she wants to experience some bell ringing. We can do this. She’s going to be in this area on Wednesday, and I ring bells every Wednesday at the same tower, so they have to be glad to see me and be nice to anyone I bring even if my visitor lives four thousand miles away and is never going to be anyone they can ask to ring that wedding when all the local band are in Bermuda. So I say, great, stay over Wednesday night, I’ll take you to practise. But noooooo. She doesn’t have time to stay overnight . . . grrrrrr . . . let it be known that I do not take it well when I am teased about bell ringing. So, okay, she’s going to be here about four hours, we’ll have tea, hang out, whatever. And then I’ll put her back on the train and make rude gestures as it pulls out of the station. And then I’ll go bell ringing.
I got back from walking the hellhounds this morning to a message on my phone machine that she’d missed her train and er um not only is she getting in late but she’s going to have been on a train for a very long time–apparently the rerouting was via Edinburgh–and er um was that offer of a bed overnight still good? Er um.
At this point I looked vacantly into the middle distance for a moment with a grisly little smile and contemplated my options. After running through a few of the more extreme ones I decided the one that appealed to me the most was to say suuuuuure, I’ll give you a bed for the night (I might even throw in supper if you behave) but (a) you have to come to bell practise with me and (b) you have to GUEST BLOG. After all, the new rule is that anyone who stays overnight has to guest blog. Mwa ha ha ha ha.
^ Plan? There was a plan?
** Next time you’d better give me BETTER WARNING or there will be SERIOUS TROUBLE.
Hay fever
I wish I was talking about the Noel Coward play.* SNEEZE. I’m sitting here thinking, I didn’t bring this SNEEZE on by saying last night sneeze that tea at the Ritz SNEEZE was like being a character in a Noel Coward play, S-N-E-E-Z-E, did I (sneeze)?
When I was younger, and even more of a loose cannon than I am now, I had true killer hay fever, the kind that eventually would kill you, when your head exploded, if you hadn’t died already of the brain damage caused by banging your brain against the inside of your skull every time you sneezed violently. You really can feel mugged by a paroxysm. Added to this was the interesting fact that I was allergic to (apparently) all the hay fever drugs out there, both the ones that worked and the ones that didn’t. It’s especially insulting to have hives or a headache or a stomachache or space-cadet-itis or dizziness or what-have-you and still have your hay fever. I had interesting summers for many years. Hay fever is one of the reasons I moved back to Maine, because I could just about bear the pollen count up there.** Although I spent a lot of my Maine summers . . . wait for it . . . in Manhattan. I had a severe Tourist Avoidance complex. Most tourists*** are afraid of Manhattan summer weather, which is sensible of them, and they all run off to Maine. The pollen count in Manhattan was mostly bearable too, so long as I didn’t hang out in Central Park a lot.
When one talks about the mental derangement of moving three thousand miles and over a national border to marry someone one has known for a weekend, the quality of one’s hay fever doesn’t usually come into it. But in fact I think I was a lot more nuts to do it when I knew how bad my hay fever was than anything about Peter, who was obviously a fine upstanding sober responsible British citizen and not an axe murderer†. And the first few years . . . well. I’m not entirely joking about brain damage. And then local honey††, homeopathy, and middle age††† began to take the edge off.
Today has been a highly undesirable return to previous form. And I know it’s my own fault: I took a wrong turn with the hellhounds and we found ourselves walking along the edge of a field that puffed up great clouds of pollen with every step. Oh dear. And furthermore I have been slack about local honey this year because of the freaking calories. Next year I’ll just have to get fat.
SNEEZE. And I haven’t even told you about the nettle rash. Hey, I have a riding lesson tomorrow. . . .
* * *
* http://www.enotes.com/hay-fever in case you’re interested. I’m pretty sure I have read this and have not seen it staged, but I can’t remember why it’s called Hay Fever. Possibly the mad Bliss family have been driven mad by the insanity of their sinuses.
** My worst weeks tended to overlap with the black fly season, which sort of got the yearly hell over with in one swell foop. I was also allergic to black-fly bites. I stayed indoors a lot.
*** Not all–by no means all. I know this very well, because I have the sort of face that out of towners think looks harmless enough to ask directions of. Sometimes they even ask me something I can answer. I mean accurately.
Of course I’m living in yet another tourist mecca here in the south of England. I stop moving my lips when I talk during the summer here, which makes my accent less identifiable, and clerks are less inclined to try to help me with the money, which I find really annoying. I also try not to sound too American when American tourists ask me directions: the last thing you want, when you’re a tourist, and revelling in all the strangeness, is to find yourself talking to someone from home. I know. Back in my tourist days I had my ears pierced at Harrods so I could say I did for the rest of my life . . . and the young woman who did it was from Boston. I was living twenty miles outside Boston at the time myself.
† And only charmingly eccentric. Mostly.
†† Very, very, very local honey. Anyone out there who’s tried the eating-local-honey-to-cure-hay-fever trick and it’s been a bust, it’s possible that you either didn’t start early enough in the year (February at latest here in the Northern Hemisphere) or your honey wasn’t local enough. Hampshire honey did nothing. Honey from the beekeeper next door worked a treat.
††† Some day I’ll post the entry I wrote about Getting Old. Mostly it’s a ratbag. There are bright spots. One of them is the possibility that your hay fever will start to wear out its youthful exuberance.
Ewwwwwwww
I had a bad night last night, worrying about driving my little collection of billets doux to the lab this morning. My vet, who also suffers from Doing Too Much Syndrome*, hadn’t sent me the directions, as he was supposed to, so I was going to be forked into Monday morning not having had a chance to accustom myself gently to the prospective adventure. I have never been to the town in question, it’s better than an hour from here on the south of England’s hell-and-damnation road**, and I’m one of those people with a negative sense of direction: guessing which way when I’m lost, I’m always more than fifty per cent wrong.***
Oh gods. Oh help. Oh dear.
And it was going to be hot. † I don’t like driving and I don’t like heat, and I especially don’t like performing the one in the presence of the other. Also I was developing that weird ME headache that says ‘your body, mind and will are about to be riven asunder to a greater or lesser degree for an arbitrary period of time, have fun’ which was not the best prospect for what-counts-in-my-life-as long distance driving. So I sprang lightly out of bed (crunch, thud), threw on the bare minimum of clothing appropriate to the meteorological circumstances, bundled hellhounds into the car††, and a certain styrofoam cool box into the boot†††, and at 8:30 am set out for my vet’s clinic. Before he’d come up with this clever plan about my driving the radioactive core to the lab myself, I was going to get it to him Monday morning, and he’d courier it on. He’s only about forty minutes from me, as well as being somewhere I can find.‡
And I did find it, despite a certain amount of input from the ME, and the weather. And Mark’s assistant and I were cheerfully labelling plastic bags when Mark reappeared from ringing the courier and said, no, no, it all has to come out of the bags and be put into pots, two pots, one per dog. I know he’d said jam jars, but I didn’t realise these were actual instructions. I didn’t have any jam jars I felt like losing forever. I stood there rigid with horror and Mark told his poor assistant to take the bags upstairs, open all the windows, and . . .
And I, like the candy-ass poltroon that I am, turned and fled. But I also sent her flowers the minute we got home.
* * *
* Who among us does not? Note, however, that he always returns clients’ phone calls. If you’re desperate, you ring his service, he rings back. Except he goes on holidays, the ratbag. What is this with holidays? I don’t take holidays, I don’t see why anyone else needs to. Especially long ones. The occasional three or four day weekend I would allow. He’s going to be gone two weeks. I could have run away and joined the circus by then.
** You can’t go east-west. You can only go north-south. Maine was like this. It’s one of the things I’m not nostalgic for. Although, of course, I don’t have to be, because it’s here too.
*** This is what I mean, but for mathematicians and purists, okay, I’m wrong more often than fifty percent of the time.
† True. It was hot today. The mercury in the big thermometer on my garden wall was beating its tiny fists against the top of the glass, crying, Let me out! Let me out!, except for the fact that this is a boring modern thermometer and there is no mercury involved. It’s still pretty sultry now, although the ambient temperature feels a lot better after an hour and a half locked up in a bell tower with seven other people, no fans and a window that doesn’t open. Gah. This is the tower that only holds practise once a month and is kept going by us visitors. Only one local ever comes, and she wasn’t there tonight. Our ringing master is a fearless young woman who likes to ring fast so she does what she calls ‘pushing it along a bit’. However we rang Stedman twice and I got to ring treble for Cambridge^ so I’m happy^^. Hot, but happy.
^ Cambridge is usually the first of the ‘surprise’ methods anyone learns. At least around here. + Surprise is the really complicated stuff. ++ The first step toward surprise is learning to treble bob. As with ordinary methods the treble in surprise also has the simplest line, but simple is relative. And treble bobbing requires a lot of . . . well, bobbing, or dodging, so you’re yanking your bell around faster or slower nearly every stroke, as well as counting places+++ like mad so you know which yank to be giving it. And I don’t get a chance to do this very often.
+ Wild Robert has a fondness for Kent, but that’s because it’s easier to hold together when only two of the six of you know what they’re doing.
++ Opinions differ, I believe, about whether Stedman belongs in this category. It’s not surprise, but it’s certainly complicated. One of these days I’m going to write out Stedman and post it here for your edification and dismay, but Stedman, like surprise methods, has lots of jiggy bits.
+++ Ie your place in the method, which changes every stroke
^^ The ME, having made the afternoon a non-event, said, okay, okay, go bell ringing, we don’t care.
†† Yes, I took them along. (a) I keep them with me whenever I can, because that’s what dogs are for; (b) because I drive as little as I can get away with, and because I won’t leave them in the car, they don’t have a lot of experience in car rides that last more than ten minutes and some day when All of This Is Past and Done, I am going have the occasional overnight in other good footpath country, and take them^ with me; (c) I would walk them, speaking of walking, on the way back, somewhere new and strange. To make up for the walk we didn’t have on the first hat-buying expedition. -And we did this, including walking through this fantastically beautiful ex-mill that’s been turned into its own little private estate–barring the fact that it has a public footpath running through it–with old mellow brick and yellow thatch and roses on the wall and the peacock on the lawn. . . . Darkness saw it before I did. He was behaving strangely even for a hellhound, and I was trying to drag him along and it was like what people tell me trying to put a cat in a carrier is like: they suddenly have eight limbs, all with spikes on the ends of them, which sink into the ground and then expand at the tips, like the nails they use for wallboard. It’s amazing how immobile a fifty-pound hellhound can be when he concentrates. And then an enormous peacock stalked across the drive behind us and I saw it too. Conceive, if you will, the thoughts of a bird-mad hellhound on sight of his first peacock.
^ And my laptop
††† Note that it was, in fact, still cool. Modern technology, as well as a mile-deep well that exhales cold, are wonderful things. I’m trying to decide if I can reuse any of this stuff, however, despite the number of innocent plastic bags I sacrificed to my diabolical purpose. I guess I’ll keep the well.
‡ The first two appointments I had there, with the previous canine generation, I dragged Peter along to navigate. Also the map on the clinic’s flyer bears no resemblance to the actual roads and local geography, which seems to me a trifle unkind. Maybe it’s some kind of test.