UNDER A GLOWERING SKY

Here at Chez Finn in Santa Rosa we are under the weather, both literally and figuratively. Literally in the sense that we seem to have moved inside a giant steel ball bearing. All we see overhead is a dirty scrum of dark clouds. The weather is gray, cold and wet. And it has been this way for nearly three weeks. Which coincides with the figurative portion of this allusion; we came down with a nasty bug at the same time the sky went irretrievably into Seattle-mode. And true to the holiday spirit of giving, we have been passing said bug back and forth between the three of us – wife, child and self – since then.
For those keeping score, this is my fourth cold of this fall. Ah, the joys of fatherhood!
I have been stuck indoors busying myself with filling hankies full of yellow phlegm and reading every book in sight. I knew I topped out on the boredom meter when I spent a full weekend watching high school football championships – and enjoying them. If there has been any football game of even moderate interest on television in the last 3 weeks, trust me, I have seen it.
Vivienne has a good old fashioned case of the croup and we have installed a vaporizer in her room in the hopes of getting her back to normal. For someone as sick as she, there hasn’t been a lot of whining and complaining. She has left that to the 2 adults she lives with. My wife and I have hourly illness comparisons in a futile effort to determine who is sicker; and therefore in need of the most sympathy.
I think I’m winning.
The regal Akita’s reaction to all this has been to ignore the lot of us. She can smell the sickness on our breath and when any one of us tries to give her a hug she gently but firmly slides away with a sidelong glance that says; “You’re nuts if you think you’re giving me that disease.” Then she climbs the stairs, leaps upon the bed and falls asleep. Smart dog.
If I were still a skier I could at the very least be all excited about this miserable weather, figuring that if nothing else it was dumping truckloads of snow in the Sierra. But now I don’t even have that going for me. No, now I get to appreciate fully how grey and wet Santa Rosa is during the winter. And to add final insult to injury during one of the recent windy storms part of our roof blew away and we sprung a leak. I called out a roofer and learned the sobering news that, while they could put a temporary fix to my current problem, my roof was 25 years old and I would need a new one soon. All for the not inconsiderable price of fifteen thousand dollars.
It’s enough to make a man want to lie down and weep like a lovesick schoolgirl. But if I did that I’d need a clean hankie and they are all in the dryer.