Another Rainy Monday

Oh, but it’s a gloomy day out there today.

The sun tried to peek out once around lunch time but before that and after that, the skies have been grey and it’s done little but pour with rain or threaten to pour with rain.

We’ve had so much rain lately that even I’m fed up with it. I usually love the rain. After all, it’s one of the reasons I wanted to move back from L.A. Ironically, it’s quite depressing to have sun all the time and to know without absolute certainty that even though it’s a little cloudy in the months from May-September that it’s not going to rain and, if it does, it’ll be a few raindrops that are just enough to make the dusty cars look terrible. I got fed up with sunshine all the time. I know, I know- readers who are in the wet and soggy Midwest (including my mother) will laugh and say I was crazy. However, try it sometime. It’s like getting to eat your favourite food for every single meal, whenever you like. Eventually, it stops being your favourite meal and you yearn for something different.

This may explain why I’m tired of the rain. For the past two weeks, we’ve had five days of rain to every two that are sunny. It’d be nice if that flipped and we’d have two days of rain and five days that are dry.

Still, as the saying goes, into every life a little rain may fall. In our case, it’s been quite a lot of rain but, well, it makes the grass green, the seeds grow and all that. It also makes my garden a soggy mess and depresses my dogs.

It’s hard to have depressed dogs. They sit around and mope. They sigh a lot. They enter a drowsy state of ennui. It’s actually not a little unlike my mother when it’s been rainy or snowy for a while (sorry, Mum!).

The worst thing is- and my mother does not do this- is that both Sookie and Rory seem to hold me personally responsible for the fact that their outdoor playground has become a mass of soggy muddy puddles and every time they go out, this wet stuff falls from the sky and soaks them.

It’s hard to explain to a pair of dachshunds that I do not control the weather. It’s actually quite hard to explain anything to a pair of dachshunds for any length of time. Rory tries to understand. She looks at me with alert eyes and does that adorable little head cock that dogs do when they recognize a word. In Rory’s case, her favourite word is “treat”. Her second favourite is “dinner.” This would explain why, when I took the girls to the vet on Friday for their annual check up and injections, I discovered that not only was Rory a whole pound heavier than Sookie but if she gets much heavier, I have to put her on a diet.

Rory used to be the smaller of the two dogs. Methinks that her preference for doggie ‘junk’ food over nutritious doggy food is not a good thing. Methinks I have to limit her snacks even more than I already am.

Anyway, back to the rain. The dogs are fed up with the rain. Rory does attempt to stay active. She often runs around and has a good chomp on a toy. Meanwhile, Sookie goes into a state of malaise where she lies on the sofa and refuses to move. She prefers to sit on my lap. I prefer her to sit on my lap except for times when she’s ventured into the rain out of necessity and returns, wet and muddy. These, of course, are the times that Sookie prefers to sit on my lap because it’s warmer.

When it does stop raining and both dogs deign to go outside, they immediately go to the infamous sewer grate. After the rain, there are fun happenings there- there is the sound of water streaming many feet below us and, even more exciting, there is a pipe that is cascading water down from the surface level to the stream below. The dogs find this absolutely fascinating. They find it so fascinating that whenever we go on a walk, Rory must investigate all the sewer drains to see if they, too, are doing interesting things.

I’m a bit tired of sewer drains. Fortunately, if I provide the pebbles, Rory has figured out how to drop them into the drain herself now. It’s weird but I figure it means she’s not Up To No Good. I’m sure the sewer department would disagree but, hey, they haven’t had to chase her after she’s got out of the worlds’ smallest hole in the fence.

It looks like both tonight and tomorrow will continue to be wet so there won’t be much sewer drain activity or any outdoor activity of any kind until at least Wednesday.

It just means that I’ll have a couple of sulky dogs on my hands. I’d like to make them understand that I can’t control the rain but, well, even if I did, they’d still blame me.

They are dachshunds after all.
Happy Tuesday!