Today is the first really bad weather of winter.

Things have been remarkably quiet since the summer with relatively little rain or wind.  It’s only the last couple of weeks that I have started wearing a coat outside.

Last night and today made up for all that.  The wind has been howling around the chimney pot and flapping the corrugated iron on the roof while the rain has been pissing down in torrents.  Not very nice. 

This morning followed the usual routine – brew a mug of tea, give the dog her morning treat [a biscuit], light the pipe, tell the dog she’s had her treat and to stop begging, before finally sitting down.  Sitting down of course is the mark for Penny to demand to go out into the garden for her morning piss.  She never asks when I’m standing up of course and takes great delight in watching myself hauling myself out of my chair again.  This morning was no different so I got up and opened the door.

She stuck her nose out just far enough to catch a few raindrops before turning tail and heading back to the couch whereupon she fell fast asleep.  Having been asleep all yesterday and all last night she must have needed a nap.

That dog’s urinary capacity never ceases to amaze me.  I have known her hold on for nearly forty eight hours if the weather is bad enough.  You would imagine that she’s inflate like a balloon, but she doesn’t.  She doesn’t even look uncomfortable.  Occasionally we’ll have a bad spell of weather where it rains non-stop, and during that spell she’ll wander over to the door, stare out for a minute or two and then curl up and go to sleep again.  Eventually though she will come to realise that maybe the discomfort of a bit of wet is slightly better than the discomfort of nearly exploding, whereupon she will nip out, belt over to the nearest bush and have a long slash in the shelter of the leaves before hammering back into the house and curling up to sleep again.

The rain has just stopped, but it’s still very windy.

Somehow Penny realised this and asked to go out.  I let her out and within a nano-second or two she was back in again and ready for a sleep.  Now I don’t know how much pee she dumped but taking into account the miniscule time she was out there she must have produced a flow at the rate of a few million gallons per hour, even if only for a second or two.  So I wonder if there is some way of harnessing this capacity?  If I inserted a small turbine and hooked it up to a generator I could be on to a good thing?  The first hydro-electric dog? Or should it be the first urinary-electric dog?

The tree huggers might even give me a development grant?