The Digs

Raindrops are falling on most heads not curled up in blankets on the couch or still snoozing in bed.  It's wet outside this morning and getting wetter.  It's so wet, in fact, that when I took Lily to pasture, she chose standing in the shelter over grabbing bites of grass.

I was pretty wet by the time I came into the house because "Digger Dog Brooke" had been at her favorite activity in the barnyard.  While taking a pitchfork of hay to the barnyard (aka fat pen) shelter for Lefty, I came upon a deep hole with Brooke's clawprint on it.  

Lefty was right behind me not looking for deep holes, and he stumbled.

So, I spent 15 minutes filling Brooke's latest claw work.  Brooke has a thing about digging.  Last week squirrels made her do it.  They were chattering up a storm out in the woods.  Every time Brooke heard them chatter, she ran to the base of whatever tree they happened to be occupy at the time.  

Then she dug in.  

We didn't realize what Brooke had been doing until we took a stroll through the woods.  I knew she had a digging pit out there somewhere because every time I called her back from the woods, her paws were coated with wet dirt.  Well, when we went on our tour, we could track every tree that a squirrel had once occupied.  

Each tree had a freshly-dug deep hole at its roots.  

Brooke did that digging for a day or so and then quit cold turkey.  In fact, she hadn't been digging since, until creating a little hole in the yard on Friday and that big barnyard hole this morning.  I think it has something to do with the weather because during nice weather Brooke leaves the ground alone.  

Anyway, I got pretty wet filling that hole in the barnyard, and I'm hoping my raincoat will be dry by the next time I head outside.  

Yesterday, Bill and I made like Brooke and did some digging. No squirrels.  No rainy weather at the time.  We used a spade and a special edging tool newly purchased from Home Depot to dig a trench from the house to the TV satellite dish.  

We buried television cable.  That resulted from my mowing a piece of cable sticking out of the ground near the satellite dish on Thursday.  I knew immediately after running over that cable that I had done a bad thing.  My race to the house to turn on the TV confirmed just how bad it was.  

"Searching for satellite" does happen occasionally when the dish gets packed with snow but not when the air is perfectly dry outside.   

Mowing that cable is not good for watching much-anticipated TV programs, and knowing there were some key football games Bill wanted to watch this weekend, I wasted no time calling our main satellite office here in town.

"We can send someone out there Monday afternoon," the clerk told me.  

"No sooner than that?" I asked pathetically.  

The clerk felt no empathy, especially because they were booked up with service calls and he was headed out on vacation.

I asked if there were any other locals who could fix my cable.  He gave me a name and said to call back if I could get the cable repaired sooner.  

I called the second company.  She also said Monday.  

"Oh, that's the same day my regular company said they could do it,"  I said, again summoning my most pathetic, desperate tone.

Suddenly she changed her tune and said maybe someone could come Friday.  Then, she said someone could, for sure, come on Friday, even though he'd be mad at her for schedule one more call.

Her words were music to my ears cuz Bill was gone on his overnight forest products tour, and if all worked out right, the cable would be repaired and TV up and running by the time he returned.

When 4 p.m. Friday came, I started worrying, so I called and learned that the technician was behind schedule but still coming.  He arrived about half an hour later.

"You will have to bury the cable," he announced.

"Huh?" I said. "We didn't have to do that before." 

Well, I learned that it is fairly common for people to have to bury their own cable cuz my sisters have one still lying above the ground.

Turned out this situation of having the cable repaired quickly wasn't the neat, clean escape from feeling stupid like I had anticipated.  When Bill came home, he would see the boards out there lined up across the yard.  protecting the cable.  Once more, he'd know I'd done something stupid in his absence. 

Not that Bill ever says anything; it's just that I get so embarrassed with ALL the stupid things I do which break things while he's off at work.  He always comes home to deal with the residue of his klutzy wife."  

I told the technician with great confidence that I was going to do the cable burying myself.  After all, it was my fault.  I needed to pay the consequences.    

Nevertheless, when Bill offered to go to town yesterday morning to get the edging tool for digging, I was appreciative.

And, when he actually came outside to help me dig the trench, I really appreciated that.  

Three hours later, when the two of us dragged our tired bodies into the house, I appreciated my husband's kind demeanor AND help more than ever.  

Now,  I'm resolute about future encounters with a TV cables while mowing the lawn.  I shall find every means of protection for those cables, and if I have to pick the grass from around that satellite pole by strand by strand by hand, I'll do it. 

Besides the story having a moral, it had a happy ending.  Two of our two teams won their football games handily yesterday, and WSU kept their game entertaining, despite their loss.  We watched two of those three games and just snippets of the other.

Why just snippets of the other?  We were out digging in our yard during that game.  

So, that Digger Dog Brooke has nothing on us.