There’s nothing like a shower after a hard day of physical labour.
It began at 03:00 this morning, when Scully awoke with a bout of reverse sneezing. For those who don’t know, this is a thing dogs do sometimes when their nasal passages are irritated. Rather than expel air out like humans do when sneezing, they sometimes go into spasmodic rapid inhalations to clear their passages. She’s been doing this the past three nights.
I realised today that she had a bout of this last year… around this time… and I checked our vet records and discovered it was also in March. At that time we were less experienced dog owners and took her to the vet, who suggested it might be seasonal allergy, and prescribed an anti-inflammatory, and a half tablet of regular human antihistamine tablets daily (they’re fine for dogs!). She settled down after a while, but by then I was awake, and I have trouble falling asleep again once fully awake. So while my wife and Scully went back to sleep, I was pretty much up for the morning.
When they went off to work, I began cleaning the house thoroughly, to get rid of any aggravating dust. I dusted the entire bedroom – including places that hadn’t been dusted for way too long. Then I vacuumed the bedroom plus the whole rest of the house – a thorough and meticulous vacuuming, not the regular quick weekly once-over. By 11:00 I was ready for the next phase: shampooing the carpet.
I went to the hardware store and hired a carpet shampooer, which I’ve done before, so I knew how to use it. I did a full wet clean of the entire house, finishing around 14:00, with a short break to grab a quick lunch. After returning the hired cleaner, I stripped the quilt cover and put the inner quilt out in the sun to air and get some ultraviolet light. It was a hot day today, which helped dry the carpet with the windows open. Hopefully this level of clean will help Scully’s poor nose and she’ll get a better night’s sleep tonight – with the help of half a tablet of Telfast.
At 17:00 I went to pick up my wife and Scully from work, because she had to bring home the entire switchboard(😳) to prepare for working from home next week, due to coronavirus precautions. Her work has been tough this week with staff preparing for this big change, so we were both pretty worn out. We decided to go out to dinner to our favourite local pizza place, to support their business in these trying times. The restaurant was emptier than usual, but not by much – rather than every table occupied it was about two-thirds full.
One thing I realised today was that for most of the world this whole coronavirus thing has been disruptive and scary for a few weeks. But here in Australia we had those horrendous fires over the summer, which really took off in November and just went on and on and on, followed by the terrible flooding which eventually put the fires out. We here in this country have been dealing with non-stop existential economic and societal stress for five months now. We were already worn down in January.
We need a break.
Tonight my wife and I needed to go out and have a nice dinner. People in other parts of the world might not be able to or want to do that at this time. But tonight we needed it.
New content today: