Rain, rain, rain

It's like living in the produce display case of a grocery store around here, I swear. Four days in a row of rain and counting. The garden is too squishy to hoe and the yard is full of sucking mud.

The rain has caused or abetted the following events:

(1) Comfort food. Turnip risotto, chile con carne, apricot tart.

(2) Walks in the woods. The tree canopy keeps the rain off and the temperature is perfect for hiking. The s.o. especially likes to go into our woods with a pair of pruning shears so he can maintain the paths--and create new ones--as he walks. We followed our stream onto the neighboring hunting preserve and found a fantasyland of mayapples. We are going to go back later in the season and pick the ripe ones for jelly.

On one walk in the woods, the s.o. nearly trod on a timber rattlesnake. I saw it first (I always see snakes first; chalk that superpower up to my years of fossil-hunting, which gave me the ability to pick out hard-to-see objects in natural environments). I screamed my Snake Scream ("uuuuuuuaaaAAAGH!") and the s.o., not knowing what he was about to step on, treated me to a delightful performance of his Bee Dance (which looks like a crouchy hippie dance, except faster and with the legs lifted much higher). The snake was sluggish from the rain and didn't give us the time of day. Our friend who is a surveyor says that in all his years of tromping around the Georgia woods, he's only ever seen two timber rattlers, so we had a rare sighting indeed. The practical upshot of this event is that we have been making fun of each other in passing, around the house:

"uuuuuuuaaaAAAGH!"

*Bee Dance*

It's good to be able to laugh at yourself, n'est-ce pas?

(3) Muddy dog. Our foster dog Gracie is having a tough time of it out there, and is bored silly because the rain keeps her confined to her doghouse or (when we decide to dry her off) the crate on the back porch. So we finally braved it and brought her in for an Encounter with the other dogs. Miraculously, nothing much happened. Gracie humped Cairo a lot and he wasn't crazy about it, but then he can't be expected to be over the moon about it, now can he? Silver and Gracie didn't actually show much interest in each other, which is as good as I think we're going to get considering how tightly Silv is wired around other females. Taxi the cat got in a couple of good, hard bitchslaps.

So I guess we'll try that again sometime soon.

(4) New plantings. The spring lettuce had gotten bitter and the arugula had bolted, so I ripped it all out and replaced it with mustard greens and collards. There are a few summer lettuces in progress, so we'll see how they tolerate the sun when it comes back out...if it ever does.