Blah blah blah

If I could write for half-an-hour what would I write?  I’ve gotta tell you!  Thus!  Thus!  Thus!  Same thing the tulip leaf says, thrusting from the duff of the flower bed.  Thus!

Spring is exciting at our house.  Wait.  I said exciting, but Gunther suddenly flopped over on his side and appears to be sleeping.  I had tried to sleep, but Gunther barked and barked in the back yard.  I believe he wants to annoy the neighbors, all sides alike.  I got up, dressed, folded up the blanket I’d been sleeping under, made it out to the back room where a big rocker is available for me to stabilize my body while I put on my shoes.  All the while “bark  bark bark bark.”

Once I got outdoors Gunther quit barking briefly, then, after I let him out of the backyard, ran over to this small tree with red leaves.  I don’t know what kind it is, but it has thousands of little white flowers.  Gunther evidently found the tree to be an affront to his existence so he ran up to it the way another dog might approach a mailman, barking frantically.  Was the dog thirsty?  I was grasping at possible reasons for his behavior.

After a couple of requests for G. to come indoors, he did come in and, yes, he drank copiously of his water dish.  Maybe I should check his water dish out in the garage.  Looks like it has water, but it might be unpalatable for some reason or another.

Anyway.  That is the saga of Gunther and the barking at the tree.

Since the last time I wrote I have used that stretchy rubber band thing I described to exercise the muscles in my operative leg.  I did the requisite two sets of each exercise, once.  I’ll repeat tomorrow.  I’ve also figured out how to do identical exercises without using the rubber.  I simply lie on my side, front, and back and let gravity supply the resistance.

Now I have a plan.  I’m going to the garage where Gunther’s water dish is, bring the dish in, wash it, then fill it with clean water.  This might work better for little doggy.

I’ve written for just 10 minutes, now.  I can rattle on and on.  For some reason the garage smells like cheap perfume, and I think the source of that is the cheap perfumed candles I’ve been melting to make fire starters for the winter.  These fire starters make starting a fire on a cold day a cinch, even if I don’t have a lot of little sticks or kindling.  In order to make them, I plug in a portable kitchen hotplate, put on a tin can filled most of the way with fragments and stubs of candles.  I’m pretty lucky, in that my sister-in-law’s husband is a preacher and they use lots of candles in their church services.

Anyhow, once the hotplate is hot enough to melt the candles in the tin can, I open up paper egg cartons and pour wax into the little cup-shaped compartments.  Most often I just pour about all a dozen or 18 of them will hold, which is a tin can full.  Other times I take drier lint and poke into the little cups first.  The wax goes further that way and I get a lot more fire starters per canful of wax.

This making of fire starters is a sort of ongoing project in the garage, but hot wax does pollute the air with waxy smoke that I’m sure is not good to breathe.  Therefore, I make sure to put a fan in one window to blow air in, and open a second window to let the smoky air out.  Gunther has freedom to enter and leave the garage summer and winter, through a doggy door.  The garage is heated with electric baseboard heat, and well-insulated too.  I spent several thousand dollars to refurbish and straighten out the garage, adding a new concrete floor, reinforcing the roof and walls, then hiring an insulating company to fill the wall cavities and the attic with as much insulation as they could hold.  I bought insulated windows and a damned nice insulated overhead door. and an insulated regular door.  And an insulated doggy door.  There.  That is about all there is to say.  I bought electric baseboard heaters and hired an electrician to install them with thermostats.  What more is there to say?  The garage is bright, warm, well-lit, but stinky from the damn cheap perfumed candles.

Almost been writing for a half-an-hour.  At this point my bladder and bowels are telling me that when I reach my goal my next goal will be to put the computer down and trot right into the bathroom.  Ah the golden years of retirement!  One cannot stay more than a few minutes away from a serviceable bathroom.