Longest rainy day and intolerance

I was thinking back about a "nice"  evening last week when our friends Bill and Mindy stopped by.  I was leading horses up from pasture, and Bill was working outside near the shop.  As we visited with our guests, I learned that Mindy and I (a couple of journalists) share mirror-image mindsets on the weather we've experienced of late.

In fact, she stated something almost word-for-word with what I'd said to Bill a couple of weeks ago.  It dealt with the fact that we haven't really had any sensation of the "longest days of the year" in 2010 because they seem more like the shortest.  

The excessive amount of dark, rain-filled clouds contributing to gloom both morning and night has removed all sense of the wonderful light moods that we normally enjoy this time of year.  It's more like December, only the ground is green and not white.

This morning,  as I slowly got myself going on yet another dark, dismal day, I thought about how we've missed out on our sense of summer.  Last fall, we were deprived of  the beauty of autumn, thanks to an early freeze which sapped all color from the usual brilliant and fading leaves.  And, even though I didn't complain, we did not have winter as we know it.

It's been a strange past few months, and who knows what we have in store. 

As Mindy and I continued to talk, we noted several similarities in our outlook.  For example, there's just so much housework one can do every single day while being cooped up,  and outdoors-oriented people quickly grow weary of conjuring up inside "projects."  

"After a while, I think maybe I should bake some cookies," Mindy told me, "and I find myself spending too much time at the computer."  

Ditto!  That's me to a tee.  

Well, here we are again on the first day of summer on the longest gray day of the year.  I have once again shut all the windows, turned on the living room thermostat and have just flipped the electric heater off.  Its job was to provide some heat so my pant legs,  from 15 minutes  spent outside doing my chores,  would dry.  

This morning, I bit the bullet and just fed the horses in the barn.  I knew they'd let me stand out in the pouring rain waiting while one of them finally bit its bullet and walked over the barn stall threshold into the slop outside.  They're not stupid, ya know.  They know enough to STAY inside out of the rain.  

So, they got fed inside. 

This morning's paper is really skinny cuz it's Monday, and we don't get the Daily Bee on Monday's, so paper reading lasted all of ten minutes.  The house is pretty clean, and, no, I don't want to read a book or bake cookies.  We've got plenty of blonde oreos sitting on the counter.

I do have a column I can finish for the River Journal, and that will involve "too much time at the computer."

Last night I finally planted some more bean seed (Iz the third time a charm?) on a ridge in the manure pile ABOVE the high-water line.  My rototiller, since my brother helped me fix the starter cord, is still sitting out in the north garden where it has remained for three weeks now.

I did rototil that area once the starter cord worked again and quickly planted some potatoes, corn and beans THREE WEEKS AGO.  Nothing resembling any of those items has appeared.

All tolled, I'd say that garden spot has remained under water about 95 percent of those past three weeks.  When I went there last week to cut a pretty blue Iris (with a lovely aroma and given to me by the Camp family)  for Mindy, I tried stepping inside the garden.  My foot immediately sank about three inches into the muck.  

That was at the garden's dryest stage in recent weeks.  I ended up threading my hand through a hole in the woven wire fence and stretching it as far as possible to get the Iris.

We can count on less than one hand the number of nice days we've had in the last month, and I'm finding myself totally resenting having to spend five hours at the Women of Wisdom luncheon Saturday---only because it took up a great portion of that nice day with our having to remain inside while the sun was shining outside.  

Pretty pathetic to judge things by those standards, I'll tell you.  No offense to Women of Wisdom.  I can only imagine the mood of the luncheon if it had occurred on one of the gloom days we've come to know so well.  

Anyway, here we are again, complaining.  My apologies.

I'm thinking of what I have to do today and trying to figure out on one more day how I'll be occupying my time doing another countdown aimed at that elusive date three days from now where the weather map shows a big smiling sun.

Only problem is that once we reached the point of being a day shy from thinking we're going to be happy again and can get on with summer,  those damn smiley graphics keep moving on down the calendar to three days later. 

I wonder if we'll see fall colors this year!