constance | a fine and fancy ramble

There is an awesome thing about my house, I mean, in addition to all those other awesome things about my house that I insist on sharing, and that awesome thing is that I appear to have a colony of turtles living in my back yard. (Is it a colony? A herd? NO! Lists of venery all agree that it's a bale of turtles, so I will be using bale henceforth. I take my terms of venery very seriously, People of The Internet, as no doubt you do too.)

Anyway, where was I? A bale of turtles, living in my backyard, or at least there are one or two turtles who get around like you would not believe, because three out of four lawn-mowings result in my standing patiently around with the engine running for a couple of minutes while I wait for one of them to trundle out of the way of the mower, and on the occasions when the grass is long enough to hide a turtle -- this happens more regularly than it really should, since I am a haphazard backyard landscaper -- I end up shuffling my way through the yard pulling the lawnmower backwards behind me so that I don't hit one by accident. Which has actually happened before, one day a couple of summers ago that I don't really like to think about much because we are super-softhearted and also sort of into denial and avoidance at my house. :/

I do so like turtles. Every time I see one in my yard, I get this shock of gratification. It's as though I've been given a secret bonus gift for having bought the house.

:::

In other news, Gilly-the-Dog is still with us, and we are rearranging our lives, now, less in manner of hosts accommodating an unexpected guest and more in manner of, say, a castle battening down the hatches in preparation for a siege (because Gilly, it turns out, is a puppy, with all of a puppy's heedless chew-first-and-ask-questions-later tendencies). We are raising the blinds in the window closest to the door when we leave so she doesn't eat them in her eagerness to watch us go. We are keeping all mouth-sized objects either four feet off the ground or behind firmly-closed doors at all times. We are not bothering with the crate except at bedtimes, since she's somehow learned to open the door and escape. We are getting her inoculated, we are introducing her to the decidedly skeptical cat. We are playing our new favorite game; it is a complicated game that involves both fetching (Gilly) and herding (Leory) so that it takes approximately three minutes to move a bouncing ball the fifteen-foot length of the hall. We are, in a week, getting her spayed, which I guess will be my final concession that even though I wasn't planning for or expecting a second dog, I ended up with one anyway, which is just the way my life goes most of the time.