I woke up this morning to the sound of footsteps on our hardwood floors. The floors were put in back in the 60s so they're plenty creaky, but the weird part was that I knew K had left for the store only a little earlier. There was no way she could be back in time. As I gained a little more consciousness I realized that the sound was coming from the underside of the boards. Unfortunately, I knew exactly what was causing this. My dog, Bubba, had broken through the crawlspace hatch and was running around underneath the house. He'd done this before, but I'd thought I solved the problem, but he found a way through it.

To follow a slight tangent, Bubba is a stray. He was abandoned near the home of a friend of my dad's, who came through looking to pawn the puppy off on someone else. My parents had their ancient collie/chow mix, a purepred but neurotic Great Pyrenees, and five of the Great Pyrenees's half Great Pyrenees, half American foxhound puppies. Obviously they weren't looking for any puppies. Sadly, since then the old dog has died, all of the puppies have either been given away or gotten lost, and the mother dog was almost killed by the vet by a botched spaying. Anyway, we ended up with Bubba, who earned his name through his thoroughly redneck apprearances. We know he's part chow. His tongue is half purple and half pink (in a rorschact pattern). We think he's part lab because he has fully webbed toes and loves the water. He retrieves pretty well too. He also probably has some rottweiler because of the shape of his head and some of his markings, and I think there's some sort of scent hound in there as well because of the way he's always got his nose to the ground. He's also got a peculiar stiff-legged mid-speed gait that I've seen before on certain breeds, but I can't recall which ones. So Bubba is very aptly named, I think.

We've already had to take measures to keep him from climbing the fence (I'm not kidding, he climbs out) and the last thing I want is for us to get a burst pipe or a power outage because of his underhouse explorations. Right now I've just stacked cinderblocks in front of the hatch, but I'm going to be figuring out a more permanent solution soon.

On an non-canine note, it's finally started raining again here. Before last week we'd not had measurable rain in 2 months. The grass was nonexistant, so I haven't used the lawnmower yet this year. I was having to water the garden three times a week for at least four hours a shot and still it was kind of struggling. We left for Cleveland and a tropical depression blows through (we're far enough inland that hurricanes don't much damage, but close enough to the coast that they make up a goodly chunk of our annual precipitation totals). It dumped nearly six inches of rain in one day and we've had a couple of unrelated showers since then. My yard already needs mowing (all 5 acres of it) and the garden really took off with the exception of the tomatoes that have the blight and probably won't make it. I'd been a bit upset about the lack of rain (Bubba could walk across our pond and watering the pecan trees we had planted sucked), but there are several side effects from getting enough rain that I'd forgotten . I hate mowing. I hadn't had a bugbite yet this year and my garden was nearly pest free. Since the rains, my legs and arms are being eaten alive by mosquitoes every time I got out. And these aren't just the normal mosqitoes for the area (which are already large by mosquito standards), but these giant black and white striped ones that blew over from Central America or the Carribean during a hurricane a couple of years ago. They're big enough to make crunching noises when you slap them and you can see them coming from several yards away. These guys are freaking evil.

I'm going to the store in a few minutes and picking up a vat of dill pickles. Consuming vinegar actually discourages the buggers from attacking you and I can't stand bug spray.