An Apology to the Rain

Yesterday, I mentioned that I have been mad at the rain. There has been a lot of it. It’s filling the backyard with water. The backyard is where the puppy pees and poops. Our home, and therefore office, is crusted in mud, like some ship hauled up from the deep.

After blogging that, I was reminded of something: This winter, I was hoping for a rainy spring. Publicly hoping for a rainy spring. I wanted Barton Creek to be running, full-force, at least once this year.

Barton Creek is running full-force.

Or at least, that’s my impression. I haven’t gone. It’s possible to do the thing I wanted to do, and I haven’t done it.

There’s a fair reason for this: We don’t know if our puppy can handle the creek yet, stimulus-wise or belly-wise or swimming-wise. Probably not the first body of water we’ll take her to. Gonna do that somewhere a little less chaotic. There’s also a fair reason for why I didn’t think about this in December: I didn’t know when we were going to get our puppy. There’s an unfair reason, too, of course: I didn’t realize how much work puppies are; or how disastrous the rain would be when it comes down, unrelenting, for weeks on end like this is some thunderstorm-filled version of Portland but with way fewer sea otters in the immediate vicinity; or how difficult it would be to get our dog to just pee and poop on her walks instead of needing to go in the backyard to do it (yes, I know, we’re working on it and a dozen other behavioral things because dogs are dogs and it takes some coaxing for them to be good dogs).

Anyway, my bad. I asked for rain. I got it. It stinks. Give it to me in a year or two but take it away now (but also let me at least get over the Sculpture Falls and Twin Falls while they’re falling—I took a picture in January of one of them bare and I want to do a side-by-side for myself). I learned my lesson, and I am sorry. To the city of Austin (people are grumpy) and to Mother Nature. This is my fault.