MUNGO EATS Latin America

I’m not a real “girly-girl”.  I do wear dresses, but most days I don’t wear a stitch of make-up.  I have short hair, but even when my hair was long, I never spent more than 5 minutes on it in the morning.  I think life is too short to spend time primping and such.  Also, I was never very good at things like hair and makeup.  My sisters were always sporting spectacular hairdos and impeccable makeup and I never quite measured up. 

As I look at my two dogs, I am reminded of my situation.  Sargon is my “sisters”.  Check out these peepers. 

Note the PERFECT application of eyeliner.  The line is clear, follows the contours of the eye precisely and makes the eye look simply magnificent!

Sadly, Mungo has my skills as a makeup artist. 

Kind of get the color in the right area, but mostly just smudge it around.  It is not clear, does not follow the contours of the eye precisely, making the eye look less than magnificent.   

Sorry Mungo.  Some of us are destined to be super models, and some of us, well, we just walk around at parties looking like cheap whores.  Sigh.

I love where I live for many reasons.  I like the central location, the proximity to the river, etc.  One of my favourite things about my neighbourhood is the number of large mature trees.  My yard has two huge green ash trees along the boulevard and a mountain ash in the front yard.  The backyard is home to two apple trees, an apricot tree and an ornamental crab apple tree.  Although I love these trees, they certainly contribute to the fall “work” as they drop oodles of leaves to the ground. 

I usually end up raking the leaves in three shifts.  One of the green ash trees drops it’s leaves at least 2 weeks before it’s friend, and the backyard trees drop their leaves another 2 or 3 weeks later. 

Today it was time to do raking number one, in the front yard.  It is a big job and I usually fill at least 7-8 bags for composting.  Also, I usually end up doing this chore on my own.  The kids sometimes help a bit, but they only have interest in it as long as it takes to build a big enough pile to jump in.  They then spend their time jumping and I continue to rake and bag.  This year the interest in leaf jumping was short (only 20 minutes or so).  Sigh…they are growing up.  I did however manage to keep at least on child’s interest for the whole clean up.  Enter the TORO leaf blower/vac!  I was originally going to use the blower to move the leaves that sat on the gravel under the trees, but then Sean got a look at this new toy.  He decided leaf vacuuming was just the job for a 10 year old boy and away he went.

The blower is noisy, but it shreds the leaves, in addition to sucking them up, so we ended up with only 5 bags of leaves (so far!).  I must say, I felt a little like Tom Sawyer, as I mostly sat on the deck and watched my boy do my work for me.  I would only spring into action when the catch bag needed emptying.  What could I do?…he certainly was having fun!

Boys and their toys!

I was too pooped from our weekend to write about it last night.  Actually we were all too pooped.  We were so tired, that we all hit the sack at 9 pm. 

This weekend we attended the “Super Camp”.  This was a camp put on by our ski club, Foothills Nordic, and was attended by skiers from ages 9 to 20ish, and their families.  The camp was held in Kananaskis country, at the Lower Kananaskis Lake Group Site.  That’s correct, we were camping. 

Kevin and the kids headed out on Friday after school.  I was not able to leave town until after work on Saturday.  The different training groups had activities planned for them all weekend. Sara is now in the high performance training group and she had to work awfully hard this weekend.  On Saturday morning, she skied 30 km, on roller skis.  The route…from the campground up the Highwood Pass.  The Highwood Pass is the highest paved road in Canada, and tops out at 2206m.  They skied for almost 4 hours.  That was only the morning workout.  In the afternoon, she went for a “short” 45 minute run…uphill!!  Poor girl.  She was pretty tired after that.  Sean spent the morning on a scavenger hunt.  In the afternoon, he played a game in the forest, with his group. 

Sunday, Sara was still exhausted, so her coaches decided she should join the younger training groups and the adults for a family hike.  We hiked to Fox Lake and back, a three hour hike.  It was a nice hike and the fall forest looked and smelled fabulous!  I am sorry that I don’t have any pictures of the hike, you will just have to take my word for it!

The dogs came along with us and joined us for the hike and a few other walks.  Kevin came to pick the dogs and I up on Saturday, and shortly after we arrived, Kevin and I took the hounds out for a walk along the lake.  Officially, dogs are supposed to stay on leash in provincial parks, but there were very few other people out there this weekend and once we were part way around the lake, Kevin and I decided to let the boys off leash for a little lake shore exploration.  There was much to smell and the dogs had a great old time running back and forth along the banks.  We had reached a position where the lake narrowed and the opposite shore was only about 15 feet away.  The water was deep but there was a fair amount of grass growing up from the lake bottom.  I am not sure what Sargon saw, but all of a sudden he took a flying leap into the water.  It seemed like he thought the water was not very deep.  Perhaps he thought he could hit the bottom and spring across.  THAT did NOT happen.  He  just sunk like a stone, head and all.  SPLOOOSH!!!!  He came up sputtering and splashing and swam to shore!  As he shook himself off he seemed to be thinking, “There that was fun…no harm done.”  What he failed to realize was that he was now soaking wet and it was about 5 degrees outside!  Some dogs can handle this, but ridgebacks don’t even have a double coat, and in no time at all he was DARN COLD!

We ended up sacrificing a blanket to dry the hound off as best as possible and he spent the rest of the afternoon drying off in the car.  Luckily, it doesn’t take long to dry a short coated hound! 

All in all it was an exciting weekend.  I think we will need the whole week to recuperate!!