How to enrage a dog: wash it. Pour water into the bathtub; pick up the dog; and set the dog into the puddle of water.
Works like a charm. Makes the dog stink of wet dog the rest of the day, too. 😉
We call that the revenge of the wet dog.
Cassie hasn’t been bathed since the memory of person runneth not to the contrary. She was beginning to stink without even being wet. And since she’s a practically odorless little dog (Corgis are strange in many ways, and that’s one), we concluded that it was Time. The weather’s warm enough, and the dog is…stinky enough.
Mercifully, she doesn’t bite.
Thursday it was up to Yarnell with Cassie as day dawned, there to meet La Maya at her and La Bethulia’s weekend home. Sorry, but I forgot take my camera. But it wouldn’t have mattered, because we were too distracted with chatting and walking around the little town and stuffing ourselves with La Maya’s spectacular cuisine to do much photography.
Not so easy, this junket:
First, my car has been emanating a weird noise from its left front wheel. SDXB thinks it’s probably the disk brakes, and come to think of it, last time the car was at the shop, Chuck the Wonder-Mechanic said it would soon need a brake job. Driving it up (and more to the point, down) a 2500-foot incline? Don’t think so.
Meanwhile, SDXB and New Girlfriend had invited me over to his house for a pastie dinner, also yesterday. So (wouldntcha know it?) I asked him if I could borrow his car and leave the Dog Chariot at his house, which is directly on the way to Wickenberg, which is directly on the way to Yarnell. Amazingly, he agreed.
So, the Cassie and I were running late when we left the house shortly after the sky greyed out. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful day. It was gorgeous on the low desert, hazy running up the hill, and spectacular at the top. Temperatures in the high 60s, air clean, sky blue, vultures and ravens riding the cool columns.
Yarnell: funky little burg. Why do I love it so much? What makes me imagine I could (almost!) even live there, out in the middle of nowhere with nothing to do and noplace to go?
Quiet. It’s quiet. Soooo mercifully quiet!
No goddamn helicopters (as I sat down to write this, another damn cop copter was snarling in circles over the war zone at the intersection of our neighborhood’s feeder street and 19th Avenue, that fine conduit of blight). No freeway noise. No roar of traffic from the main drag. No sirens. The sounds are…
children playing,
crows cawing,
birds singing,
wind sifting through the trees,
quiet conversation.
Peace.
It’s weird how you can feel your body tense up as you draw closer, through thickening traffic, to the city. One is always subliminally tense in this place, I think.
Spring is sproinging hereabouts, though today we’ve had a miraculously overcast day, and, we’re told, for the first time in months we should see rain tonight. Grâce à some rain from a plastic hose, we have some visitors despite a dire drought:
These iris don’t last long, but they’re truly spectacular. And they seem to be spreading. Click on the image for a better view.
Innocent (says he) as the new-blown snow:
I have no idea what this is…think it grew from some wildflower seeds I threw down last fall.
Ditto this:
Last night I watched old My Name Is Earl comedies (appropriately Yarnellesque) until midnight. This precluded my completing the stage of the client’s project that was due yesterday, so it was up at 5:00 a.m. so I could ship that off by 8:00. Then bookkeeping and cleaning and fooling around the yard and battening down the hatches for the evening’s supposed storm and cleaning house and washing the dog and shopping and eating and drinking…and now, the hour being yet early, I must edit some lit-crit. Strange lit-crit. As all lit-crit is, by its nature. IMHO.
Don’t you wish you were here?
