I love a summer weekend, when the internets are quiet because everyone is out beaching.

Scavenging nature for my own pleasure. Part I.

I've never had a garden before, so I've never been able to (as every heroine in every Victorian novel ever has done) gather flowers for the drawing room, or whatever.  We have a garden now, but it is the basement troll's baby and domain, so we don't touch.

EXCEPT!  The basement troll is tree-planting for the summer (I'm sure I've mentioned this, AND done a happy jig already, but *jigs*) so our gardens are neglected.  The front yard looks like this

and the side-yard looks like this

and the back garden looks like this.

Anything that rampant is obviously weeds, but *I* don't know different, so.

Hullo, pretty kitchen!

Speaking of gardens, my three-plant mini-garden is doing splendidly.  I think.  It is making THINGS, anyways.

I promise this will not become a mommyblog.

Because I am doing other things besides being pregnant.  Like ANNOTATING!  Remind me to go off on a tear about this anthology we are annotating, and how annotating is way more nit-picky than I'd ever imagined anything could be, and how we sometimes spend half an hour trying to confirm via reputable source when some guy DIED.  Maybe that was my tear right there.

But anyways, I was pregnant for a long time and not blogging about it, which was weird for me.  Here are all the things I couldn't tell you, intrawebz:

We knew for about two weeks before I told my sister, and a month and a half before we told our parents, and it was wacky to me that we were going to have a baby and our families didn't know but all my doctors knew, and the receptionists at my doctors' offices knew, and the girl who takes my blood at the clinic knew.

Pregnancy has turned me into a mouth-breathing moron.  The blood vessels in your sinuses swell up, making it harder to breathe through your nose and I'll be sitting here reading with my mouth hanging open like a yokel.

You can't just throw on something with an empire waist, or buy regular clothes in larger sizes, like I'd planned on doing.  Your boobs are too big in the first case and you are wrong-shaped in the second.  Dressing yourself becomes infinitely more complicated.

My boobs are ridiculous.

See Joel and Raych camp.

See the Beware of Bear sign.

See that sign not be lying.

See the bear come back five times to the campsite next to us where it had previously found a fine cache of Gatorade and Coke.

See Joel chase the bear away with a rock.

See Owen, who was equal parts Defender-From-Bears and Heart-Attack-Giver-Due-To-Resemblance-To-Bear-When-Emerging-Suddenly-From-Bushes.

See Raych put Owen to better use than terrifying campers.

See Raych discover a new camera setting and turn the trees blue.

See Raych discover full comedic use of said setting.

See Raych give Shannon the beginnings of a terrible sunburn.

See Shannon's agony.

See Shannon's lovely tan.

See Raych's chilli dog, which she needs to feed her fetus.

See said fetus.

This post is a paean to the dump. I'm sorry, The Environment.

You guys!  I have been to the dump, and it. is. amazing.  This is probably the opposite of the experience environmentalists want me to have, but I am loving the dump.

Ok so this last week I've been helping my professor clean out her basement, and it is a large basement with many rooms and almost no space to move.  THE THINGS!  The boxes of files, the old jolly jumpers, the Halloween decorations in various locations, the CANS OF PAINT.  It was daunting.

We'd been cleaning it for three straight days, and the chaotic mass took on some semblance of organization, but until you start hauling things out it is sort of disheartening to look at your three days' work and see boxes and bags.

We were disheartened.

Thursday morning we loaded up the van with cans of paint, and more paint we'd missed the first time, and bags of garbage which we promptly unloaded so we could load the twenty or so rogue cans of paint we'd found hidden in the crawl space.  And then the garbage and the rusted piping and the jolly jumper etc.

And then we drove to the dump, windows rolled down to keep from suffocating on the paint smell, apologizing to the forest we drove through for bringing gallons of toxic waste to DUMP somewhere in its midst.

The dump is very clearly organized.  Go here.  Turn here.  If you have this, go here.  Approach the scales when the light is green.  And then the man at the scales is all, GOOD MORNING!  Take your garbage up there to that fellow, and he'll tell you where to go from there!

And that fellow up by the bins is all, GOOD MORNING!  Welcome to the dump!  And he has our garbage out of the van and into a bin before we can even breathe, and is all, Take your van back to the scales now (so they can weigh you again and see how much garbage you dumped!  Oh dump, you are so foresighted) and then head over there to recycling!  They will tell you what to do there!

So we head back to the scales and it's only $20 for our load of garbage, and not the hundred-odd-plus we'd been anticipating, and then we head to recycling and pull up to the table marked 'Paint' and we're like, We have an absurd amount of paint?  (It is, apparently, free to dump your household toxins.  Probably to discourage clandestine garbaging of said toxins.  Clever you, dump.)  And the guy helps us cart the 80-ish cans of paint out of the van and shows us where to drop our metal piping and our ancient bottle of Round-Up and our defunct fire extinguisher, and we go on our merry way.

I know the dump is just A Thing That Exists and not the magical experience we'd both felt like we'd had.  Its just, we had all this crap, and now we DON'T have it.  I know a lot of it is just going into a terrible heap and is going to ruin the world for our children's children, but it isn't in the basement any more.  And everyone was so JOLLY and HELPFUL and it was the first sunny day in AGES.

I would visit you again, dump.  You have won my heart.

Have I mentioned...

that we (being my entire family) are going on a Caribbean cruise in August?

And that I found a maxi dress that is neither strapless nor exceedingly breasty?

And that I am going to swan down to breakfast in it every morning of the cruise, as though it were a very fancy bathrobe?

Recently.

We visited our friends' baby kitten.  I rubbed its face with my face and it did not mind.

I made blueberry muffins.  All of the blueberries died inglorious deaths.

Have I shown you my garden?  It's really just these three tomato plants.  I bought them mostly so I could go smell them periodically.  If they generate me some tomatoes, so much the better.

My final 29th birthday celebration.

We went to a cabin with some friends on my actual birthday, and then we went to Cirque for my birthday a few weeks ago, and then on Saturday we executed our original plan for my birthday.

Kayacks!

We have been wasting the last few years by living here and not kayacking.

You get to spy on the tourists!

And see the sights but from, like, lower down!

And then at one point you have to charge across open seas and it is choppy and there are large boats and you are small and badly steered.  But we lived to have dinner, so.

Joel promised to take me for tapas for my birthday, so we went to The Mint, which is very dark and very underground which results in poor, flash-riddled photos of the samosas

and choyela

and spicy noodle soup.

The choyela was particularly ridiculous.  I will eat all the spicy meat fragments you have.

Celebrations!

On Canada Day we wander around our province's capital like civilized people, and then on the 4th of July I force Joel to eat patriotic desserts and come wave sparklers with me on the deck and feel vaguely traitorous to his country.

Independence to all (who have it), and to all, a good night.

Georgie's First Canada Day

Georgie wants to Sniff All The Things (And, If Possible, Eat them).

Georgie and the whale!

Georgie does not like the copper girl.

The copper girl does not taste like people.

Georgie is an Immigrant Dog.  Welcome to Canada!  Bienvenue!

Georgie meets a Mountie Bear.

Georgie is seduced by an old sailor.

Georgie welcomes her master back from the war.

Georgie gets a drink, as the weather has finally turned hot.

Georgie is patriotic.