Beautiful rain!  Good, great, glorious, rain, rain, rain.  What a lovely day for getting all wet and muddy.  I am truly enjoying this.  It is good.  The forest needs it, the gardens need it and I really need it, too.  I am feeling my inner reptile.  My amphibian is showing.  If I wasn’t so old, stiff and round, I’d slither.

But that’s enough about rain.  Back to us…..

Sal and I will be drinking champagne tomorrow night.  Our kids and their spouses are here to visit and we will be toasting their gathering plus the fact that we have sold over 1000 books!  Yeah, I know……we are over-the-top gobsmacked about that, too.  Stunned,, actually.  Hard copy sales have virtually stopped but the Kindle version keeps on ticking.

What a treat! This is a book that keeps on giving us fun.

Sal is pretty funny, too.  She instructed me, “You are not allowed to check sales til the end of the month otherwise you’ll be obsessive about it!”

“That’s fine.  I never check anyway.  You do.”

“Well, we sold 208 this month.”

“It is only the 27th!”

“I couldn’t help myself.”

Yesterday was town day (in preparation for the kids arriving) but Sal went alone to shop for the groceries this time.  She picked up 200 pounds of steel for me as well. Plus 85 large bricks and a few bags of cement. It didn’t look like a lot but it was pretty heavy.

Being silver-haired and beautiful has it’s advantages and so she doesn’t have to do the heavy lifting, the ‘boys’ at the stores do that for her.  But I am the ‘boy’ at the end of the road and so I came in the big boat but brought her little boat over because it scoots up to the beach really close.  We loaded everything in to the little one and she went slowly off.  I rode quicker in the bigger boat and did a delivery to the neighbours while she crawled along the coast.  Then I headed back to the dock.

“Squaaaawk….hiss…….Your spinach and battery are here.  You better come and get ’em!”  “Squaaaaaawwwkk…….hisssssss……….sinking…….squawk…….”

It was Sal on the radio.  Seems the seas had kicked up enough to put some waves over the gunwales and the boat, riding already low in the water, was starting to take on water. She later reported that at one point the stern seemed level with the sea and she feared that the increasing weight of more and more water would soon take her down.  Sal got back on the walkie-talkie.  So did my neighbour.

“Tell my wife her beer is on the counter and getting warm!”  “Squaaaaaaaaaaaaawwwwwk………………….hisssssssss…………sinking.  Help! squaaaaaaakw!”

“She said that she’d be coming home soon.”

“Sal!  Is that you?  What are you saying?  Sal!  Press harder on the button.  I am only getting static!”

“Squaaaaaaawwwks…..I will be right there.  I have the spinach and the battery.  Just leaving now!” “Squaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaawwwwwwwwwwwwwwkkkkkk……………’GET OVER HERE!”

(No, dear reader, it is not you.  It is not me.  It  was four people sharing the same walkie-talkie channel.)  Just as my wife was having an emergency-at-sea, our neighbours were on the walkie-talkie chatting about spinach, beer and batteries.  The conversation over-the-air to the listener was unintelligible and, mixed with static, I didn’t have a clue what was going on.  But, assuming that Sally was already at the house-side shore and having difficulty at the beach, I quickly tied up my boat on the other-side dock and ran up the hill to the house and was about to proceed down when I saw that she wasn’t there!

“Sal, where are you?”  

“Squaaaaaaaaaaaawwwk…..where are you?”

I looked over in the direction from which she was coming.  She was still out at sea but I could barely see her.  I ran back to the dock and got in the bigger boat.  I zoomed around the corner and saw her low in the water but making headway.  She yelled that she was going to be OK.  She had bailed the boat furiously while she went and had managed to stay afloat.

One of our spinach-and-beer neighbours had also clued in by then and was heading out to the rescue as well.  It was good.

All is well that ends well.  And, it did.  Spinach and battery delivered.  Steel and cement at the beach.  Food in the house and Sal just a little wet and shaky.  I lay on the bed until my heartbeat slowed to normal.

Just another shopping day.