Snails

Rain + Texas Drivers = Lame

Before last Friday, the ground was scorched, people complained incessantly and the sky was a lurid blue for as far as anyone could see. We're talking 70 days of 100-degree weather. Not that I mind so much. I like it hot and the Boy sits around in his boxers. It's kind of nice. Even if he does get mad that I break all his fingers when he touches the thermostat. I like it at 85, thank you very much.

Now it has been raining daily for a week. Some rain is nice--my grass is almost neon-green in its gushing love of it. My lilies around the mailbox that looked like crispy corn husks have magically grown about 5" and are all perky with their new tall status. However, the rain invariably makes me want to be taken out back and shot through the sinuses. The blinding one-two punch of the barometric pressure dropping and a snot-bomb is too much. Combine that with driving alongside Texans is a ring of hell I feel I do not deserve. These people are not good drivers in the first place. It sounds like a stereotypical joke--I know. I don't want to be that person that repeats the same boring jokes we've all heard, but it is unfortunately very true. The motherfuckers just don't know how to drive. Of course, when you don't know what that strange clear liquid is falling from the sky, it is bound to cause a panic on the interstate. I guess when I'm stressed on the road, I don't try shoving the front end of my car up the ass of some triple-heavy-duty monster truck with Confederate flag stickers plastered across the back windshield. That's just me. Anyway, this all means that I was unable to go play with my friend today after work, since her husband was unable to maneuver through the hordes of morons in the rain, to relieve her of childcare responsibilities (the last we talked she was keeping her 2-year-old from sticking his head in a steaming bag of popcorn while he said, "Googal!" over and over again, while her 5-year-old was jumping on the couch and falling off on to the tiled floor--having two sons must take an enormous amount of energy that I cannot fathom bringing forth). Stupid rain, stupid drivers.

The best thing to do in this situation is take a nap. Then snuggle with the Boy, watch some Project Runway and America's Next Top Model for the Little People of the World (look, I can't reach the top shelves in the kitchen, I'm allowed to poke some fun). Once I emerged from the bedroom, more rain had fallen and the drips off the roof were making a terrible racket on the aluminum pan we use for Elliott the Amazing Stink-a-Tortoise. I went out back to fetch it from the yard (yes, my backyard is that much of a shithole), and the place was covered in snails. Little teeny bitty baby ones, large marvelous ones with their eye stalks and rotting leaf detritus on their shells, to a couple I swear were having sex. Then there was the one that had no shell but its body looked like it was forming a shell. Do snails form their own shells? Must research.

I squatted on my toes, careful not to crunch any little snail I couldn't see under the mass of leaves we hadn't bothered to rake up in years, and took many pictures. I think I may have pulled a muscle in my calf, but it was well worth it. The snails are eating all those leaves we kindly left there in the yard for all those years, as well as the salad the Boy threw out there (his version of composting may be a bit looser than some people's).

Boo rain and Texas drivers. Yeah snails!

Super Friend Wikus sent me an instant message just now saying snails do in fact grow their own shells.