These past couple of days have been glorious. Yesterday when I walked out onto my deck at 6 AM I wrote that Maine had come to Short Pump. This morning it was exactly ten degrees cooler, which turned me into a liar since actually...today is much more like a July morning in Maine than yesterday was! Be that as it may, it is a wonderful thing to be visited by such perfect weather. We have taken full advantage. Last night Pam whipped up an Instant Pot meal extraordinaire called Mongolian Beef something or other. We ate it with our good friend, Al Fresca...
And yes...my wife is still wearing her apron, in my opinion, one of the sexiest garments ever fashioned by human hands.
Lucy loves it when we eat outside. She spends her time alternating between full sniffing interrogations of all quadrants of her yard to bouts of rolling around in the grass on her back, tongue flopped out of her mouth, not a care in the world. As soon as she senses that we are done eating, she brings me her frisbee and insists on a session of catch and keep-away. After three or four throws and three or four demonstrations of Lucy showing off her athletic grace, she is done and back to back scratches in the grass.
We are able to enjoy our back yard this year because we employed the services of an outfit called...The Mosquito Authority. For a tidy sum of cash, I contracted with this service which promised to rid my yard of mosquitos...guaranteed. I was skeptical, but desperate. Before these guys came along, our deck was the mosquito capital of Short Pump, a bloodsucking feeding ground. But now, after a couple of months under their protection, there hasn’t been a mosquito sighting, much less a bite. It’s like a miracle. Of course, if six months from now, one of us begins to grow a new appendage, one of us sprouts a sixth toe, or one arm suddenly gets longer than the other...we’ll know why!
The other day I was out on the deck doing my early evening squirrel reconnaissance when I happened to look over into my neighbor’s back yard and noticed their new puppy standing at their back gate, giving me the once over. This lovable beast is...Boss...their aptly named mastiff puppy who is, without putting too fine a point on it, HUGE, and getting bigger by the minute. Anyway, there he was, ginormous paws gripping the fence, ponderous head cocked to one side, beckoning me to come over for a scratch. What was I to do? Of course, I had to agree. Luckily, I have great neighbors who don’t mind me letting myself into their backyard to play with their dog (at least I HOPE not). Anyway, by the time Boss is full grown he’s going to be bigger than me, so I have a vested interest in getting on his good side. When I returned to the house, Lucy was on me like white on rice...as manic as one of those bomb-sniffing dogs from the Department of Homeland Security. She demanded to know where I had been and who I had been with. She could scarcely hide her disappointment when she discovered that I had been with...Boss. All Lucy knows about Boss is that he was this adorable new puppy next door one day, then she turned her back for a minute and the next thing she knew he was this towering beast slobbering all over her beautifully clean coat!
Our culdesac now officially has the best dog population in the entire neighborhood...
Lucy the Golden
Van the Pug
Boss the Mastiff
Pippen the Golden Doddle
Maverick the Lab
Kane the German Shepard
...and Buddy the whatever
No comments:
Post a Comment