on a sparkling note.

In the last 24 hours I've made a quick overnight visit down to the city and back, a 700km return trip.

That spell of time included, among other things, and in no particular order of chronology or importance :

-2 hikes at a leash-free park that the girls go nuts for

-1 massive grocery shop, making the most of urban conveniences such as fresh produce, decent prices and something resembling a good selection.

-1 trip to ikea, to get Tim his #2 special at the food counter (I was good and resisted the siren call of the rest of the store)

-1 quick stop at the bookstore (a must-do for any trip to the city)

-1 hospital visit for yet another session (the third in the last 12 months) of up-close-and-personal, inside a giant magnet, trying to figure out what I've broken this time

-1 quick drawing session to improvise a birthday card

-several frantic hours of catching up on 2 days' work that came in while I was doing all that driving 

We're back home now. The two dog walks were a study in contrasts, and those were the only opportunities to get the camera out for photographs. Yesterday afternoon was warm and summer-like, and we took the dogs all the way down to the creek, at the bottom of a steep 50 metre (115 ft) red shale ravine. The way down/up is a sort of ad hoc goat path that cuts diagonally down the steep side of the ravine; it's about 300 or 400 metres long and it never fails to turn my legs into jelly, for fear of slipping. The dogs bounce down it like gifted acrobats as I cling to tree branches and roots and say little prayers. Then they come bounding back up to ''help'', and ask what's taking me so long.

The creek had very little water in it, thanks to the months of dry weather we have had, but there was enough for the dogs to frolic in. At the end of their session, we walked down the creek a bit and watched for salmon spawning. We saw just one, and I managed a bit of a picture, worth including simply because of the sheer remarkable character of these fishes' journey: they come up the creek from the lake (no easy feat this year, given the shallow water; the fish here was large, and was half out of the water while swimming along the creek bottom) and travel upstream some 30 kilometres to Lowville, where they spawn and then die. Determination doesn't even begin to describe this annual migration.

Just as we started onto the trail back up to the top of the ravine, Soleil and Arwen saw a squirrel on the cliff face above the goat-path, and they shot off upwards after it, and made some remarkable distance upward before finally thinking the better of it and deciding to listen to me screeching at them to stop. Arwen slithered her way back down, and Soleil tried to follow and panicked at the vertiginous descent, and in her infinite wisdom decided to continue her climb upwards. She scrabbled to the top of the ravine and disappeared out of sight over the top lip. This elicited the maternal freak-out instinct in me, and I don't even remember climbing that dreaded, fearful trail...I just got myself to the top, calling out her name non-stop, in hopes that she would have the sense to follow my voice along the top of the ravine. While I was panicking a bit, I also felt a weird sense of serenity; and my instinct was correct; when I reached the top, Soleil was standing a hundred metres or so up the trail, looking for me. Oddly, Arwen stayed with me the whole time, rather than going after Soleil. Anyway, all's well that ends well.

This morning, I took the dogs back to the park for an abbreviated walk, not including the creek. Not so much because of what had happened the day before, but because it was 12 degrees celsius with sideways rain. I had to change all of my clothes in the jeep when we got back, because I was soaked to the skin, but the Labradors, being Labradors, didn't give a flying &?%* about the weather, and cavorted their way around the meadow like mad things.

The things we do for love.

After Soleil injured her back leg in July, we took the sofa out of the living room to prevent her from climbing up on it. The sofa itself was a bit of an eyesore, and it never made it back into the house. So now we have a big empty room, with just a rocking chair for seating. Well, needs must, says the Princess...