7:40 in the morning: Under a clear sky, the air is hot, wet, and soggy. Ruby and I just shot in the front door, ahead of the babysitter by 20 minutes.
Yeah: that’s right: 20 minutes of peace and quiet, into which to jam one’s breakfast and coffee.
The Human stepped into a riot of ants as we stumbled along the sidewalk around the park. Got bit up royally.
Ah: The coffee is poured!
And so, to chow down…more or less…
8:00 a.m.
She’ll be here in minutes…
This is the thing about being a lone wolf all your life: You don’t want anyone around you!
That always has been my state of mind. Well…as long as I can remember, anyway.
Seriously: one of my very first memories is of sitting in a sandbox with the neighbor’s small kids, a boy and a girl. The sister brat takes her little shovel, scoops up a mound of sand, and SLAMS it into my face.
Instantly, my eyes are full of sand. And HURT? Lemme tellya hurt….
That was when I first learned to dislike and distrust other people.
We hadn’t left for Arabia yet…I just turned three years old on the day we arrived out there.
So…think o’ that: By the age of three, I hated my fellow humans. Already. Six miserable years in Aramco’s dreadful Ras Tanura grade school did not endear humanity to me any further.
So…yeah. Much as I appreciate whomever my son has hired to ride herd on me in my own home, I just don’t want anyone around me! Privacy is more important to me than safety.
Not a healthy attitude, I suppose.
****
Cripes. It’s twenty after eight. Where IS that woman?
Any chance (ohhh please, God!) that she’s not supposed to come over this morning?
Naaahhh…. More likely, she’s caught in traffic. I think she comes in from the far east side, which means she gets into profoundly hellish traffic jams on the way to the job. How glad ARE we that we don’t have to commute to work? Let us count the ways….