At Ease, Folks

I know many of you have been worried sick about what has become of Harry. How is he faring? Does he have a passport? Does he meow with an accent? Poor (or, actually, lucky) Harry is still an inhabitant of the good ol' US of A and has been boarding at my parents' house, where he has been the model of cat sainthood and able to enjoy the good life with great friends, good food, and nice scenery. I just wanted to put all of you at ease who have written to me in emotional agony about his status (and that would be exactly none of you, thank you very much. PBBBBBBT).






On this side of the Continental Divide, we've continued to poke around the hometown and are receiving our first set of visitors, Molly's Nana and Grandpa. Right before the Doyles got here, Molly and I went hiking (note to self: carrying two wee ones -- one on the inside and one on the outside -- on a 90 degree day, not one of my smartest moves. Unless, of course, I'm trying out for the high school wrestling team and attempting to sweat off some pounds before the big meet. Then, it's an awesome idea and I can be hailed as a genius.) up in the hills on the edge of a gorgeous crevasse area that was the site of some forest fires in 1994. It was quite stunning and not anything I could adequately capture on film, so you get to see the petite hiker instead because she fits into my camera lens easily.

Molly often manages to read my mind and know EXACTLY when I would like her to move along at her quick-like-a-bunny pace and she chooses those times to sit on her rump (calmly saying "sit down" as if I couldn't tell that's what she was doing) or she runs one step forward and 37 steps backwards. She also seems to know when I would like her to hold my hand and walk with me and chooses THOSE times to put on her bat-out-of-hell turbo charged shoes and wriggle from my grasp and run Forest, run. That's usually in traffic. This time, however, we were simpatico and when I finally had to let her out of the pack so that my body mass didn't reduce by half, she and I moved along at a mostly healthy clip and only needed to put back in the pack for some steep parts. It was a beautiful thing.


Nana and Grandpa arrived on Tuesday and Molly has died and gone to heaven to have a bigger audience than just moi during the day. She's played lots of call and response with Grandpa, learned about riding in a big Jeep, and tickled Nana a lot. Meanwhile, I've loved having extra sets of hands and have had fun having other people with whom to explore. We also have found some good restaurants and while the weather has been strange due to the forest fires (including a really odd blanket of pea-soup smoke for a couple of hours this afternoon), we've gotten ourselves out and about quite a bit. Nana's birthday is tomorrow (as is Uncle Greg's and Molly's great-great Aunt Tid) so we celebrated with dinner tonight and some pretty exciting duck watching to end the evening (can we say best birthday EVER?!). It's been fantastic to have family here and look forward to their return visits and to my mom's visit next week.




I will also admit that today was not another sunny day in the Okanagan. We had some fierce thunderstorms this afternoon that cooled things off and watered our grass. I just wanted to throw the east coasters a little bone.