Midnight musings

I sure am tired of these late/middle of the night musings.  Tonight I slept soundly until midnight, when Tess started pacing around the bed.  Well, she's taking cortisone, which makes her thirsty, which leads to excessive peeing, and we don't want her to do that in the house, now do we?  So I'm up.  Yeah, I'm up. 

I had a nice evening with the Nadals, wine on their lakeside porch then delicious dinner.  They'll be heading home next week it seems.  I guess it's getting to be that time.  J&M will be leaving in a while, Linda will be here another six weeks or so and then WHAM the neighborhood reverts to its natural state.  That will feel very strange but it's an annual ritual.  What will I do this winter?  I made a $100 bet with Ted that it will be a hard, cold winter with a lot of snow.  He thinks La Nina is a bunch of hooey so the predictors are going to be wrong.  It would be worth the money to have him be right, that's certain.

I'm having some guy come to do yard work for me ("What???" says Fred.  "Can't you do your own yard work?")(well, he's going to pull up blackberries and weeds and the mess that's at the foot of my steps and NO!, I can't do that)(Oh, OK, maybe I could, but I don't want to).  I guess he's a young man, I found him through the online neighborhood rag, he posted a request for doing yard work for $20 an hour.  Fine, fine, come on over.  He lives in Conn. but his mother is up here and he's "between jobs."  Now watch, he'll be some 45-year-old loser.  No, he sounds young.  I guess he's coming Saturday.

I bought the last of the cucumbers at a farm stand that always has tons of cukes.  The woman there told me a blight took over the field.  That sounds strange, not long ago they had tons and tons of cukes.  Anyway, I took the last 1/2 peck they had for $3.50.  I threw out all the pickles I made earlier this summer, they were too spicy and no good, and for some reason I'm feeling driven to make another batch.  When they're good, they're good.  Now I know that, when they're bad, they're bad, too.  I don't usually put pickling spices in the pickles but I tried that last time.  There are red pepper flakes in pickling spices (who knew?) and they sure can ruin a batch.  I guess I'll spend much of Friday peeling and slicing cukes, they have to soak in salt water overnight.

I gave Tess a bit of a cortisone bath but didn't let the shampoo sit for 5 minutes, and didn't wash her legs at all, I just let them soak.  How does one get a dog to sit still for 5 minutes, fully lathered with special shampoo, the way the bottle directs?  I was lucky she let me lather her up for 60 seconds.  Now she's very shiny--I don't think I've ever given her a bath before, she swims in the summer and rolls in the snow in the winter.  And rolls in the ragweed in the fall, which is the whole problem now.

Oh, Tess has come back in and now Treasure is outside, trying to figure out what Tess did out there.  Come on Ladies, let's get back to bed.