Monthly Musing - June 2020 - Upside down

I’m sitting here looking at a blank page, wondering what on earth to write my Monthly Musing about.  The theme of my blog is “looking for the extraordinary in the everyday”; the idea is that it makes me look past what I’m doing all the time to see what’s special, what’s different, what I might miss if I don’t take the time to see it – but after weeks and weeks of the same four walls, the “extraordinary” of being in lockdown has become “ordinary” and things that really are out of the ordinary now but would have been ordinary before are sometimes a cause for concern.

 

Just this afternoon, I was standing outside the vet’s practice waiting for the veterinary nurse to bring some medication for one of our cats, chatting to a lady whose pet was inside with the vet and another man, whose enormous St Bernard dog was sitting companionably on his feet whilst they waited their turn.  It’s not ordinary to have to stand outside, no longer allowed in to see the vet or even into the waiting room.  Our pets go in without us (“I really don’t like that”, says the man, and I have to agree with him) and we are given advice from a half-open door.  We might not like it, but it is how it is.  Extraordinary becomes ordinary.

 

Hot, hot, hot!

Phew, it's going to be a hot one again today!  The rain has moved on and we're now into a mini heatwave which is set to bake us for the rest of the week.

The dog and I were out early as he doesn't cope very well with the heat and even before 9am when we were on our way home, he was flagging.  Mind you, he had been running around like he was in the final furlongs of the Grand National and skidding in the wet grass like a small boy on a shiny wooden floor, so I'm not surprised he was tired.  He's in his favourite place under the stairs at the moment, absorbing the breeze from the open front door - although one of our cats has started to bring small furry friends into the house, releasing them to a new life under the book case, so the door isn't open as often as the dog would like it to be!

We walked through the woods this morning as I thought it would be cooler for him.  

The leaf canopy is much thicker at this time of year so you don't get the same dappled shadows from the sunlight filtering through.  We did see that there are some new residents living amongst the trees, though ...

After the rain

I started writing this post after a couple of days of whopping thunderstorms - but despite the post title, it doesn't seem to have stopped raining since!  

The dog and I had a very wet walk this morning (it was lovely - no one around, birds singing, dog paddling in the streams, rain bouncing on my jacket, just like old times!) and calling into the Post Office afterwards, the lady who worked there said as I dripped up to the counter, "Ugh, it looks awful out there".  Normally, I think it would have been, but the novelty of it all meant that I wouldn't have swapped it for anything.

Small daughter and I spent our time the other evening playing "Name That Tune" whilst the thunder rolled about the house, making even the dog jump and he's not bothered by fireworks so it must have been loud!  "Name That Tune" is an old TV show that I remember from being younger - basically, you have to guess the name of the song within the first few notes.  The contestants on the show used to say, "I'll name that tune in ... " and then would choose however many notes they thought they could guess it in.  This was a bit of a cheat game for me as it turns out that all the time in my teenage years that I spent in my bedroom listening to cassette recordings of the Top 40 (come on now, I'm not the only one who sat poised over the tape recorder waiting for Number 1! 😀) was not actually wasted time at all and has now come into its own as I can name a surprising number of songs as long as they're all from the UK charts in the 1980s and early 90s.  My street cred with small daughter went up no end!