I was just outside in a t-shirt! I took Adia out with me to open the gate for the mighty golfer’s return and took the opportunity to practice a bit of ‘leave it’ while she was on leash. I need to ramp up the practice so that she is steady for Kirsten’s cats… but I think it’s going well. At the end of the practice I could throw her treasured squeaky toy several feet away and she stayed rock solid by my side. The toy is a high prey drive object with a squeaky so required some restraint on her part and I even eventually got eye contact - she did good :-)
I mentioned her guts the other day… Adia was reacting to liver treats so I’ve been slowly upping the number she gets in a day and we’ve had no tummy upset. We’ll see how it goes today - she scored big on them. Plus there have been two nights that she’s gotten a raw chicken bone-in breast with her supper. Still good guts. There is hope for her!
Saturday was also a lovely day so Carm got his plowman’s clothes on and set to work digging a new garlic bed. Just as he finished removing the sod, Leo called to say he’d be over with his industrial sized, tractor powered rototiller. Hurray! The bed was puffed up in no time. Carm then put several bags of sheep manure on top of our heavy clay. We had to get ready to go to Mom & Dad’s for supper so he didn’t dig it all in - that was for Sunday.
Sunday, after digging in and turning over the earth, we got dirty with 110 garlic cloves. They are carefully tucked into the dirt where, with the help of the Sun and the Earth itself, will turn into 110 garlic bulbs next summer.
The power of a handful of dirt combined with rays from the sun never ceases to amaze me. A little seed will turn into a flavourful plant. Or look at a tree - it is nothing short of wondrous that a giant tree can grow from a tiny seed. Magic.
Saturday night we had our belated Thanksgiving dinner. The family (minus Kirsten, but not for long) gathered around Mom’s giant table. She’s going to need another leaf when Kirsten gets here! Or perhaps another whole table to tack onto the end.
We took a little drive this afternoon to pick up some canned tripe for the dogs (on sale!), canned pumpkin, also for the dogs and on sale, and to check out a few other odds and ends. It was a beautiful time for a drive, with the trees garish along the roads. They are spectacular this year. The colour is later and more vivid - so many reds and vibrant oranges.
Since we were out, and since I didn’t really feel like cooking, we searched for somewhere to have an early supper. We settled on a new location of Dunn’s smoked meat deli. The place was deserted (we were there during the shoulder time between lunch and supper), and the meal was tasty, although not on par with Swartz in Montreal.
Dunn’s is at an unlikely location - next door to a nefarious looking motel and a skanky strip club! While we were paying a tiny woman with huge grey hair entered. When she turned around I was curious to see her face masked with pink lipstick way outside the lines and thick black eyeliner rimming her eyes. She was outside the norm and I wanted to know her story. I was intrigued. Who was she? Was she a retired stripper? How did she get to be standing there with makeup like a mask? Will I do the same thing in a desperate attempt to keep my youthcbb? We finished paying and left, questions left unasked.
Adia during a rare moment of rest - she is like a perpetual motion machine…
“October sunshine bathed the park with such a melting light that it had the dimmed impressive look of a landscape by an old master. Leaves, one, two at a time, sidled down through the windless air.”
~Elizabeth Enright
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