It has been five days since the Fateful Tick Bite, and Eric does not have an inkling of a target on his back (unless there is a figurative one for some undisclosed criminal activity I don’t know about), so we held a trial, and Betty, still having the damning evidence of Eric’s DNA hanging out of her slimy, little mandibles, was unanimously found guilty, released from her plastic cup prison, and sentenced to the flush-a-roo. Bye-bye, Betty. Let this be a warning to all the rest of you ticks out there in the Cabot woods: do not mess with Eric and Patti Wahlberg (or their poodles). We come armed with needle-nosed tweezers and plastic cups, and we pluck and flush to kill.
It has been raining steadily for two days now. On Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday it was sunny and in the 80s. The solar panels soaked it up like Miami Beach sun bathers. Today it is gray, damp and barely 50 degrees. I was emailing my sister-in-law who lives in Western Mass this morning, and she and I agree, hands down, that the same weather every day is BORING. I know there are multitudes of folks out there who will heartily disagree with me on this, especially when that sameness of weather is that of the hot, humid variety, à la sunny Florida, or the dry, temperate, 75-ish variety, à la sunny, southern California. I lived in the latter for almost 40 years. Yes, it’s convenient; yes, weather is rarely an obstacle; yes, you tend to take it for granted; yes, we even enjoyed it; and yes, (to us) it is BORING. And, YES, we know the winters in New England have been almost unbearably long, cold, and somewhat brutal the past few years—but we get to escape to southern California for two months every winter, while we hold the eight weeks of review classes for our biz, coincidentally scheduled in sunny California during the frigid Vermont months of February and March.
Much to our surprise and delight, the poodles “did their business” out in the yard in the rain today. Several different times. Both numbers! I am not saying they pranced happily into the sopping wet meadow—they actually looked more like they were headed to the gallows—but they did it. In California, they pretty much refused to go out in the rain, ever, and had to be taken to the front entryway of the house, which had an overhang, and even then they didn’t like it because the cold, damp wind would tend to blow right up into their tender poodle nether regions. They much preferred the dry, warm kitchen floor to make a biological deposit. Since steady rain is in the offing until Wednesday, this willingness to “brave the storm” is a great relief, indeed. I did have a brief thought today while watching them shiver as they crouched in the rain, about the difference between 50 degree drizzly weather, and full-on blizzard weather, and started to get a little panicked about exactly WHERE they will be making deposits come January. I had to refer myself to Blog #1, paragraph 4, where a very wise blogster (who shall go unnamed) talks about not sweating the small stuff and living in the moment, and so on and so forth, in her rather pedantic way. I realize the blizzard scenario could easily turn out as dire as I imagine—or worse, even—and that’s about as bad as it can get, right? But so far everything has turned out better than I expected, and those are pretty good odds, so there you go. Might as well wait and see.