A Trip

On Tuesday night we got home from a trip to Oliver.  A nice relaxing time.  Oh I take things with me to work on. Fabric to do some sewing, and there is fruit there in the freezer if I feel like making jam.  Guess I didn't feel like either, as no sewing or jam was done.  Oh well, too many good books to read. Too many walks and runs to do, and mountains to climb.  I had a book by Joanna Trollope that I took with me to finish off.  We got there the Wednesday evening before Easter.  Both the library and the thrift store were closing for all four days of the Easter weekend, so we had to get to both of them on Thursday.  I found another Trollope book at the library, and then realized that I had one already in our bookcase there.  Got both of those finished, and fully enjoyed them.  I also read this book. 

 A pretty quick read.  To summarize it quickly, a person goes through all of their possessions, in a specific order, starting with clothes.  You handle each one of them, and only keep the ones that give you a feeling of pleasure as you handle them.  Something I will attempt to do with certain things.  One thing I did take out of it was to fold clothes so that they are not stacked, but stand vertically.  Easy to see everything at one glance when you open a drawer, and you don't have to rummage through stacks to find what you want.

I did chuckle at the irony of bringing that book home, because I had just come back from the thrift store, and they were having a bag sale. I swear that just about everytime I go to the Oliver thrift store, they are having a bag sale. So of course I came home with a $5 bag. Some clothes, including a pair of Tilley pants, a Denver Hayes skort, and a flowery skirt.  A nice china mug, a November one with asters on it, my birth month. A couple of English china plates. A burbury plaid scarf for Larry, and one of those rice bag things you heat, he needs it for his neck.  A few little stuffies for dog toys. Just what we need, more 'stuff'. 

As usual, the day we left home was spent madly rushing around to get things done.  Surprising what it forces you to do when you know you aren't going to be there for a while.  And then the same when we were leaving Oliver.  The gardening that should have been done days before instead of reading all those books!  I did manage to get some potatoes planted, the grape vines trimmed, fertilizer tossed around and grass seeds spread on some bald spots in the front lawn.  And of course we have to give the dogs a walk in the morning.

We went to one of our favourite walks, the dyke at the Number 9 Road bridge.

It's always been a pretty stretch, with a relatively smooth couple of wheel tracks down the middle.  Well since the last time we were there, they have graded the whole top of the dyke and it's kind of ugly now, like a two lane road, dyke style.  We are worried that they are going to dump a layer of gravel on the top, which will make it totally unsuitable for Calli, unless it is packed hard.

Sometimes along the dyke we see the weirdest things.  This was a big mess of what sort of looked like sheep's wool, or maybe llama wool?  Why and how did it get there?

There are a few good dog swimming spots along there, and on the way back Jake and Luna ran ahead and sat to wait.  They wanted to swim but the water really was too cold.  They both went in once, half heartedly, but after that if they couldn't reach the stick by wading, they just watched it float downstream.

Larry took Calli down for a drink, and then I had to help him haul her back up the very steep little hill.

Just before we got back to the truck, we passed this tree.  I'm not sure what kind it is, maybe a maple of some sort, I'll have to remember to check it out next time we go, when the leaves are out.  It was just covered with these tassels, and the bees were all over them.  Can you see the yellow pollen sac on the bee's leg?

We left Oliver just before 4pm, and were home four hours later.  This is what greeted us at home.

So nice that the evenings are lighter longer.