WATERMELLEN

It's a cool grey morning here on Prince Edward Island and the air smells wonderful: fresh and flowery.  Henry has had his long walk, snuffing at everything assiduously and letting all the neighbour dogs and rabbits and foxes know he's been by.  Well, that took a lot of vigorous leg lifting!!   And he had to dance on his hind legs a couple times to let me know how much he enjoyed it!!  And perform a few prance steps too, just out of general joie de vivre!  Because moving just feels so good!!  And after that, rehydration with a BIG bowl of cold water -- tasted so good!  Licking his black lips!! Now he's ready to do pretty much nothing for awhile.  Nobody does nothing better than Henry! And, following Henry's fine example, nothing is what I've been doing a lot of also.  Well, I've been reading blogs over at Spark People and leaving a few comments here and there as people "take to the lifeboats"!  Since it was announced June 6 that the Spark People site is

Here's the English version song written in 1992 for a contest to celebrate Canada's 125th birthday.  And the French lyrics version is immediately below.     https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XcNDR61mxGg   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwI9vElpdAI No, the song didn't win.  But it's still a pretty good song.   And: even though all Canadians are this July 1st reeling with daily news of more and more unmarked graves of indigenous children buried at residential schools: Canada is still a pretty good country. Perhaps just not as good as we thought we were.  As we liked to believe we were.  I'm still flying my flag, of course I am.  But my blog isn't headed "Happy Canada Day!!" with exuberant exclamation points.  Because  this is most definitely a Canada Day for sober reflection.   How could this nightmare have happened here?  And continued for decades? How can wrongful inequalities still be happening here?  How can we make sure, at an absolute minimum, that

They encouraged me pretty hard to go for a swim yesterday.  And I really was hot.  HOT hot hot.  And both of them were splashing around and swimming. Telling me how cool it was.  How much I'd like it.   Apparently they both took swimming lessons when they were pups.  Well, I heard her say she even taught swimming lessons.  Little humans aren't born knowing how to swim.  But they kept saying that I didn't need swimming lessons at all. That I could swim instinctively.  Dog paddle.  That my feet are even webbed to make it easier. My kind of dog is apparently especially designed to be good swimmers . . . so we can go out and retrieve ducks.   They assured me that they would be right beside me.  That they wouldn't let anything bad happen to me.  But: there weren't any ducks at all out there yesterday.  I wasn't falling for that! Still, they wouldn't stop with the "Swimmy swimmy swimmy, Henry".  So finally,  just to oblige them,  I did go down almost to

  Before we moved to Prince Edward Island, our dear son had given us a wonderful book of PEI paddling routes (and another, for hikes, which helped us find lady slippers a few weeks ago!).  Both books been read and reread even before we got here . . . with maps consulted and much discussion and planning!   These little bright blue plastic kayaks are little more than toys: hardly the thing for wild waves!  We don't want to be out "on the ocean" in our "Lifetime Lotus" boats -- not even in a sheltered harbour.  And PEI is so often really really windy!! But: they are perfect for bird watching in shallow shallow waters: very stable with their broad draft.  That's why yesterday, for our trial run, we set off for Henry's Pond: a calm little oasis created behind a dam.  It was so lovely: geese, ducks, red wing blackbirds, huge trees and a meandering stream beyond the pond stretching north . . . which we explored until blocked by some trees that looked a bit thor

  Oh my, we looked young back then.  But in reality, we weren't so very very young when we got married on June 22, 1979: we were 28 and 30.  It was a very small wedding, just the two of us and two witnesses to the court house. Strawberry shortcake and champagne afterwards!  Not so pricey -- and we'd have to say, the years since have been not a bad return on our modest investment! Because oh my: there have been a lot of years, 42 of 'em , since then!   So many life changing events too: a couple of babies, now 37 and 34; a tornado; for me, a return to school after six years being a full time mum and then a total change of careers which made it possible for the two of us to work together; for both of us, three houses and then a big move last February from Ontario to our fourth house on Prince Edward Island! Here we were, a couple years ago when we finally had a formal anniversary picture taken for the first time.  We were just beginning to think about retirement then and all t

https://www.sparkpeople.com/mypage_public_journal_individual.asp?blog_id=6277456   Way back in December 2016 over on the SparkPeople site I'd written a blog about the struggle to maintain weight loss as we get older.  And today, a good Spark friend BROOKLYN_BORN  dug out that old blog to comment on it at the ex-Sparkie google docs site.  When I weighed 240 pounds back in 2000 (that was a typo in yesterday's blog -- I first lost the weight which I've kept off in 2000 and not 2020) I could actually eat "more" calories because I was burning a certain amount of fuel lugging around that excess 90 pounds.  Yeah.  Those extra pounds were just like carrying around, 24/7,almost 2 big bags of dog food: and pumping blood through it, too!!  Well, pretty clearly with my weight creeping up and up back then I was still eating more calories than I was burning but I COULD stay steady at the obese weight while eating more than I could eat after losing the weight. And another factor