How I spent my summer vacation

OK I’m back. Once again, I departed on a summer vacation with a list of things to do as long as my arm, and once again, I did many of them but not all. I return to the land of the living with the homestead in good order, ready for a happy onslaught of company at next weekend’s family reunion.

I would like to share a few things with you all. The first one is a phenomenon I like to call ‘Vacation Hair.’ My once-fabulous haircut, dubbed the Bonjour Baby! by my hilarious hairdresser Azra, went through the vacation hair translation machine and came out comme ça:

What people at work don’t know about me is that I often wander the earth looking like that. If they ran into me in my town one day, while they were enjoying a day of sightseeing or something else genteel, and I was running into town for a jug of milk or something, they would not have stopped to chat. They would likely not have recognized me.

The biggest undertaking of my two-week vacation was to build railings onto my new deck. I had the crazy plan to use cedar and galvanized steel cable, and people doubted me (I’m not naming names) but I think it turned out ok for a home-made jobbie. Even the guy who built my deck was impressed, and is off to go put steel cables on HIS railings, the copycat. So I present to you a visual tour of my railing installation project:

There were several underlying themes to my holidays: the rain (almost every single day), the hair (see above), some medical experiments (no animals were involved), lots of cleaning, which made absolutely zero difference ‘cause the house is still a mess, and I am now convinced that Rosie speaks English. Well, understands English – more work is required to get her to speak it. We spent so much time together, she’s probably jonesing as badly as I am right now. At least I hope she is. She’s probably catching up on her sleep. We spent all of our time together, as she became like my little shadow, following me from room to room, sleeping wherever I was working. We spent good quality time together, me and Rosie, and we are now closer than we’ve ever been. I now officially love her TOO MUCH.

I went to the land with my brother and the septic folks to talk about my BIL’s cottage, I went to the land for the afternoon with my girlfriend Fiona and Rosie, and we went this past weekend for the first overnight stay at our cozy cottage. We had our neighbor friends up on Saturday with their dogs and we had a lovely time, basking in the first really nice day in a long time. We floated on air mattresses, ate chocolate chip cookies, and then when they left hubby and I took Rosie fishing. She’s not a good fisherman, Rosie. She thrashes around in the boat. She threatens to jump in the water at all times. It’s so not relaxing. Eric still managed to catch two fish, one of which became the dinner that we ate at 10:45 pm (damn campfire cooking!) in our trailer, by the light of two tealights. We learned that we need to improve the lighting in our trailer.

Sunday a.m. we built a little deck off of the front of our trailer, using pre-cut boards taken from our old deck at home. A little bit of recycling DIY. Another fun swim (Rosie has the air mattress all figured out now. She rides it on her own, all four paws up, standing on it. I have now purchased her a boogie board so fun pictures will come, I am sure of it.) and then home for a day of normalcy before the back-to-work bug hit.

All that surfing makes her sleepy.

I should be in that photo, spooning her and smooching her ears!

And now, I am back at work. I have a bit of a tan. I feel like a caged wild animal, but at least my hair has been tamed.