Who is Rube Goldberg?

And…..what is he doing at my house?  OK, so it’s been raining cats & dogs.  Well, actually, fat, florid, giant, heavy, smattering wet drops.  I haven’t noticed any of the cats, possums, birds, raccoons…anybody, really…  ‘Cuz it’s too darned wet to go outside.  In fact, I refused.  We won’t discuss the ramifications of that, except to say, that one should be mindful of walking near the outer dog door in the garage.  I believe I was fully in within my rights as a fastidious hedonist, to refuse to wade through flooding water just to go outside to perform bodily functions, when I could so conveniently just stop at the doggie door inside the garage & take care of my needs.  It seemed like a win-win to me.  Not everyone saw it that way, though.

Maezi, the intrepid Maezi, waded through an inch of really cold water, to go outside to do her business, in the predator preserve.  What a trouper.  Although I will say, the sight of the little wet dog tracks trailing throughout the house was rather charming.  The funny thing was our parents running after her with a towel.  (They had only been running after me with paper towels & some choice words I don’t usually hear all that often).

Anyway, the even more hilarious part was watching them, & their friend Rube Goldberg, in the pouring rain building some strange contraption that they claimed would prevent the garage & predator preserve from flooding.  Yeah.  I wanted to run up & down the “ramps”.  That would have been fun.  I might even have deigned to do it in the rain.

Weird, though.  Cobbled together with an olio of odds & ends, “the invention” was uncannily efficient.  The overflowing gutter water ran down the roof, funneled into the extra gutter troughs, leading right to the drains.  The flooding stopped, the garage stayed dry & I acquiesced to the demands that I “go outside”.  In more ways that one.  Ugly, that thing was, but ingenious.  I just hope the next contraption has more panache.

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