As I was enjoying a short story by Evan S. Connell called "The Crossroads" my wife came outside to our back porch carrying her brand new electric dog fur clippers. Despite my recent attempts (and I do mean attempts) to thin the beast, our family mutt Figalwicks had become a walking mat of fur. Being the helpful husband that I am, I joined her in the work -- I brushed and cut knots while she did the actual clearcutting. The whole thing proved to be a lesson in futility. A sizable amount of fur was removed but mostly because the brush attachment to the clipper pulled it out, not because the blades cut it off. A good deal of that fur became airborne and hovered at right about the level of the average human mouth. Fig now looks about as bushy as she did before, and a lot more fed-up with her owners.
After that failure I turned my attention to the gutters. We've had a lot of rain in the last few days and our house is surrounded by maple trees. All those little helicopters fell into the gutters, each of which become something of a terrarium. We were growing our own sugarbush 8 feet above the ground all around the perimeter of our house.
Clearing these was just a bit more disgusting than eating large clumps of dog fur. And now my entire backyard smells like a stagnant canal. My gutters however, are flowing freely and I lived to blog about it.
How was your day?
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