Friday not-so-funny

Imagine you are trying to get through a list of to-do items before driving into Metro Vancouver to see friends for the first time in ages since relocating to a new city. It's a rainy day, with the skies either pouring down or sprinkling. Another autumn day on the West Coast.

The street looks like this as you look out from the front balcony of your vintage 1972 house, and you can't help but notice that because of the cloud cover those beautiful mountains seem to be erased from the earth:



As you look up at the front lawn from the carport, stopping for a moment as you cross things off your list, you admire the rainsoaked shrubs and bushes:



Then you turn back to get back to work so you can get on the road. Your husband, who has an almost irrational hatred of bamboo because he fears it will take over, has left the clumpy remains of dirt and roots he hacked out of the earth in the backyard in the carport until some future day. It looks like this:



You didn't think of this when you tied the dog up in the carport while you did what you needed to do. And now, because he decided rolling in it and rubbing against that dusty heap of dead bamboo was great fun, your giant Old English Sheepdog puppy looks like this:




You don't know whether to laugh or cry so you take pictures and quickly run into the computer to blog about it. Someone somewhere might as well get a laugh while you figure out how to get him clean quickly.

And then you revisit the reasons why you love this silly mutt. But he won't get free run of the house when you leave today. He'll be staying in the laundry/workshop area to stare at the funky 1970s green and yellow floral wallpaper and think about his misdeeds. Or sleep.