I was going to write something new every day. But, that was before the moat flooded.
It started raining right after breakfast. It rained all morning, straight through lunch, stopped just long enough for me to run outside and rescue the turtles before their colony became a pond, then poured all afternoon, through supper, and into the wee hours of the morning. I've never seen it rain so much water in one day. (Fergus - he's the gardener - says he hasn't seen it before, either.)
Usually it takes a whole week or more of rain before the dungeons start to get a bit soggy, but they were a couple of inches deep with water before I got up for breakfast the next day. You might not think this was such a problem if you've only ever read about castles, but let me tell you, when you live in one, it's quite a different matter.
Storybooks always describe dungeons as dark, dank, musty places, with iron chains attached to the walls, locks on all the doors, skeletons in the corners, and smelly straw on the floor. Other than that, they're supposedly pretty much empty.
Castle life would be much easier if that were actually the case.
You have to understand, one thing castles DON'T have is closet space. You can put old oak wardrobes into the bedchambers, but it's not quite the same thing. And have you ever tried attaching shelving to solid stone walls? So storage is rather a problem, if you want to keep things organized in any sensible way.
But if you have dungeons that run underneath the entire castle, you can put wooden benches along the walls from one end to the other, and lay things out very neatly, so that everything is easy to find when you need it, without being in your way upstairs. They're spacious, dry, sheltered from the weather, and you couldn't ask for better security.
Except when the moat floods. Which is isn't supposed to do. Except it did. By lunchtime on the second day, the water was two feet deep...and COLD. Luckily Maggie, our moat dragon, knows how to breathe fire underwater, which helped warm things up quite a bit without singeing anybody.
It's a good thing Mom and Dad aren't going to be home for a while. It's going to take a long time to get everything dried out and cleaned up. Although, having so many cousins around to share the work will help a lot. (Plus, it will keep them too busy to pick on Maggie. She can take care of herself, of course, but it usually results in at least second degree burns for whoever's foolish enough to try...)
Posted by thinkum at April 21, 2004 10:40 PM