Kibbles and Bits And Some More

Apparently nobody told the weather that it is July. Because it is cold and damp and drizzly and way more like April than July. Maybe the weather got mixed up and gave us England's usual summer weather, because England certainly seems to have ours.
Today I wore a t-shirt with a light cardigan over it to work, and because it was particularly dismal when I left the house, I work a new striped, cotton scarf with it, too. I walked to Starbucks to get a coffee in the slobbery conditions, and when I got back to work, I noticed a distinctly....bacony sort of smell around me. After a bit of detective work, it turns out it was my damp scarf. Lovely. I smelled vaguely of smoked pork product the rest of the day. Luckily, I do not work with Labrador Retrievers.

My nephew Colm has been around for the past week here. He lives in Toronto, but occasionally makes forays to our city to visit. He's a nice kid, chatty and good-humored. We took him to the driving range with us the other day, and he was game, if completely inexperienced. No matter how many times we showed him how to swing a golf club, his hands kept sliding down to hold it like a hockey stick; that is with his right hand about half way down the shaft and slapping away at the ball like it was a puck. When he did connect with the ball, it was pretty impressive; that thing smoked. But unfortunately, that didn't happen very often, usually he ended up taking a divot out of the ground that would break your leg if you happened to fall in it. But he remained chipper and sunny, nonetheless. All golfers should be so blithe.

Thing 1 and her friends took a public bus to the beach, about an hour a way, last Saturday. It's a great deal, only 8 bucks each way, and the only way to get to the beach when you don't drive or don't have a car. The only thing was that the bus didn't come back home until 9:30 at night, and that would have meant that she and her friends would have had to hang around a lot longer than they wanted to waiting for it. I said I'd drive up and get them after work. I dropped The Mister at my parents house, where we were going to eat dinner, and then I drove up to the beach, got the girls and came back. When we came out of my mom and dad's, we heard and ominous hissing noise and found that one of the front tires was almost completely flat. Long story short, I had run over a roofing nail in my parents condo complex on my way back, and the tire had been leaking all the time we were at dinner. Can you imagine if that had happened when I dropped the Mister off???? I'd have been out on the highway with a gaggle of 15 year old girls and a flat tire. (And you can imagine how much help they would have been.) Luckily, we were able to patch the tire on Monday, and it only cost 30 bucks.

One of the features I can put on my blog is a counter, down at the bottom. I love that counter, I check it every day to see if anyone has looked at my blog. And they have, YOU have, and it thrills me every single time I see it. Recently, I've found a place where it shows me on a map of the world where the last 10 viewers are from, and this has enthralled me like nothing else. I check it all the time....Vancouver! That must be the Tattooed One! Calgary! That must be James or Lisa! GERMANY! My friends Anne and Jack are in Germany on an exchange for 6 weeks, that must be them! INDIA! YUKON?!? SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA!?!! I don't even know people in these places!! Strangers are reading my blog!! I'm ready to black out, I'm so excited! I have to stop myself from checking that little map every hour, it is unseemly. So, thank you, everyone, you have no idea how exciting it is to see that people read my stuff.