It’s raining.  Whiiiiiiine.  It held off long enough this morning that I managed to hurtle everyone, including myself of course, extra hard, against the forecasted likelihood that by afternoon we’d need water wings.  Or a helicopter.  And, those being the choices* would elect to remain indoors.  Hellhounds are major wusses about rain** so I took them out first***.  It was beginning to leak increasingly by the time the hellterror and I were on our way out but she’s, you know, a dog, and she shakes herself and gets on with it rather than turning hopeless and pitiful.†  Although hopeless and pitiful is to be preferred when you get home again and are trying to towel off a whirling dervish.

I’m trying to remember the last time we had a proper country hurtle.  We skirt the town perimeter occasionally but real countryside is all eyebrow-deep in mud and washing everything you’re wearing again gets old very quickly as well as reusing already muddy critter towels because you’ve only got 1,000,000 and they’re all wet, including the recently-washed ones steaming off as fast as possible on the plug-in heated-airer rails.††  And there’s no amelioration to needing several raincoats which you wear in rotation, to give them a chance to dry out.  Not to mention the permanent aroma of wet hellcritter. †††

Sigh.  And to add to the joy of the assembled the hellterror, as previously observed, is in season.  The last few days I’ve been determinedly getting her out for an extra walk(s) so I can have the excuse of keeping her locked up in her crate more indoors.  I know the smell of lurrrrrve is pervasive but the hellhounds seem to cope reasonably well so long as she’s not, you know, swinging her booty in the immediate vicinity—which she does whether she’s in season or not.  Aside from longer crate hours she’s not having a good time, poor thing, she throws herself around like that swollen thing sticking out behind her is uncomfortable, which it probably is and FORTUNATELY she and the hellhounds don’t seem to have any clue that together they possess an answer to this situation.  Mind you, I’m patrolling the bzzrgrmph out of any time they’re loose together, so they do not have the opportunity to experiment.  The kitchen floor at the cottage is never so clean as when there’s a dripping hellterror occupant:  she’s worst in the morning, for some reason, maybe just because overnight is her longest stretch shut up.  But she also doesn’t understand why I don’t seem to want her in my lap at the moment—you can see the thought bubble:  All This And No Lap??—so we have sacrificed a clean dry towel toward rectifying this sad situation.  Now an ex-clean towel.‡

We’re going to a concert‡‡ tomorrow night when I usually go to my monks, so I went to the evening prayer service tonight.  There is water everywhere.  When it started chucking it down again after B_twin left we were back to standing water that made the landscape dazzle when the sun managed to come out for a quarter hour or so.  By now we’ve got above-ground water torrenting down the roads and drowning the pedestrian pavements.  I was thinking as I sloshed after the hellhounds this evening on a brief pee run that I’m going to have to start wearing my hiking boots in town:  the water sluicing over the pavements is higher than the rubber edges of my All Stars.

With the rain pouring off my leather jacket as well as my umbrella I met Alfrick on my way into the abbey—trying to shake off the worst on the mat by the door before I left trailing-wet footprints down the corridor—who raised his eyebrows and said, Where did you park the ark?

On the way home again the long queue of traffic on the 60-mph bypass was going 35, because of the amount of water on the road.  And I haven’t even told you about how the main road into New Arcadia has been dug up by the water company, and we all have to take the back way which involves sliding off the hardtop into the sticky trough that is what the shoulder has become, every time you meet a car coming in the other direction. . . .

* * *

* And helicopters are expensive

** I’ve never decided if they hate their raincoats because they hate their raincoats or because they only ever wear them when it’s, you know, raining.  And I, as Putter On of Hated Raincoats, am doomed either way.  Nor have I ever managed to convince them that the hellgoddess’ remit does not include the weather.^  Today I decided to cut my losses and not put raincoats on.

^ Hellgoddess:  Guys . . . you really think THIS is the weather I would conjure if I could conjure weather?  COLD?  WET?  HORRIBLE?

Hellhounds:  Well, you make us eat.

Hellgoddess:  AAAAAAAAAUGH  AAAAAAAAUGH

Hellhounds:  ::blank innocent looks::

*** They came with us to the farmers’ market and had a wonderful time moseying through the back streets with me while Peter negotiated with vendors for emeralds from Samarkand and so on.  But when we got home and I took them out again immediately you could see them giving each other the hairy eyeball and wondering what my problem was.

† Hellgoddess:  Guys.  You won’t melt.  I promise.

Hellhounds [faintly]:  Oh you can’t possibly be sure.  [Hellhound delicately raises paw.  Delicately raises second paw.  Attempts delicately to raise third paw.  Other hellhound is trying to hide under a hedgerow.]  This is particularly . . . penetrating rain.

Hellgoddess:  It’s been seven years.  You haven’t melted yet.

Hellhounds turn two pairs of huge golden eyes^ reproachfully on their goddess:  Today is today.  The last seven years have been the last seven years. 

^ Dark They Were and Golden Eyed.  If hellhounds are part Martian it could explain a lot.

†† I might almost be thinking about a proper electric tumble dryer if I had anywhere to put it.

††† I actually rather like the smell of clean wet dog.  Just not all the time.

‡ Which I have to keep folded up and out of hellhound reach.  LIFE AND PROCREATION ARE SO RATBLASTED GRUBBY.

‡‡ That is Peter and Nina and Ignatius and I, not the hellpack and I.