Now I’m not all that interested in watching a golf tournament, but I do believe that I will be going. You see at the end of each days rounds, well the last three or four days of the tournament anyway, there’s going to be a free concert. Our passes are for Saturday July 26th (at Glen Abbey) and that evening Tom Cochrane and Red Rider will be putting on a concert.

I love Tom Cochrane’s music. I guess one of his most famous songs is Lunatic Fringe or perhaps Life is a Highway. I like all of his music and I’ve never managed to see him play live so this will be a real treat!

I just hope that I’m feeling well enough to go that day. My tum has been causing lots of problems in the last two weeks. Darn Crohn’s. I’ve had terrible fevers and lots of abdominal pain, plus I’ve been losing weight. It’s like I’ve been taking Phentermine or something the way my weight is dropping. That’s the bad thing about Crohn’s, well one of the bad things - you can really lose a lot of weight very fast when you are in a flare. It’s bad.

The last time my Crohn’s flared really bad and caused a lot of weight loss I lost about 40 pounds that I did NOT need to lose in less than a month. I hope that’s not going to happen this time too.

Anyway, I’m glad my brother got us the passes and I’ll be resting up over the next week in the hopes that I can go to the golf tournament and concert.

We took Midnight to Cherry Beach here in Toronto last weekend and I managed to take some pictures of her playing and swimming in the water.

It was her first time swimming, but being a true water dog she was right in there swimming around within minutes. She even swam out about two hundred feet from shore!

There were lots of other dog owners at the beach with their dogs as it’s one of the cities best leash free areas. So it truly was a dog day at the beach!

My brother works for a company that is sponsoring the event so he might be able to get some free passes. I’m pretty sure he wasn’t including me in the pass offer and that’s fine because I’m not really a big fan of Golf anyway. Chris isn’t the biggest fan either but he thought it might be kind of cool to go. Heck, it’s potential material for a blog post on his blog at least.

I hadn’t talked to my brother for a while so while I had him on the phone I asked him about his new (and only) grand daughter. My niece had a baby girl back in February. The baby is doing really well, starting to roll over from her back to her stomach and already has a few favorite toys that she can’t live without.

Actually my brother sent a photo of her earlier in the week. She’s adorable. The baby looks quite a bit like my niece did as a baby. My niece BTW is the oldest of my nephews and nieces - she was born when I was just 11 years old! So she’s never really felt like a niece to me and I guess it seems kind of weird to me that she already has a child.

Anyway, I guess we’ll know sometime early next week if Chris will be getting a pass for the PGA Tour. I still think it was really nice of my brother to offer to give one to Chris whether he’s able to get the pass or not.

If Chris does get the pass he’s doing good this week. He already got free tickets to the Amos Lee concert that we went to on Wednesday night at the Danforth Music Hall. Great show BTW, I highly recommend that you try to see Amos Lee play if you can, especially if you like music that’s a mix of Blues/ Folk / Jazz - heavier on the blues than anything.

My nephew has a photographic display at the Toronto Outdoor Art Exhibition this weekend. I really should go to that to see his work and to check out the other artists. I just love pottery and sculptures and if the artwork is anything like last years I’ll be buying some items this time around.

The only problem is that tomorrow is going to be HOT. Really hot. So … do we go to the art show tomorrow or Sunday when it’s going to be a bit cooler?

We have gardening that still needs to be done as well. We started mulching the backyard garden last week, but about 1/3 of the back garden beds aren’t finished yet because we ran out of mulch! We bought more but haven’t had time to add it yet. Certainly if it’s going to feel like 40 Celsius (104 F) tomorrow I don’t think I want to be working in the hot sunny garden. Of course I could just stay inside where it will be nice and cool, work on the computer or be lazy and curl up and read A New Earth, Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose. Yeah it’s a self help type book. It was a gift from Chris’ aunt. I should read it at some point.

The other thing that Chris and I would both like to do, but don’t have to do, is to perhaps go back to Cherry Beach this weekend with our dog Midnight. We took her there last Sunday and she had a ball playing in the water. We’d taken her to the lake before, but she’d never done more than splashed in the water. This time Chris was throwing toys into the deeper water for her to fetch and we got to see her swim for the first time. She took to it well and other dog owners said she was a great swimmer. They couldn’t believe it was her first time.

We all had fun at the beach so I think that’s a must do.

Of course this is summer in Toronto and there’s always all kinds of festivals, events and things to do on the weekends. I guess I should check what’s going on so that we don’t miss out on something good.

At this point I’m thinking we should go to the beach tomorrow - the hot day. It’s cooler by the water and if we get hot we can always get in the water. Certainly with all the wet dogs running by we will get a bit wet. Then on Sunday we could go to the Art Exhibit and then finish our gardening when we come back. If there’s any other good things going on in Toronto we’ll I guess we can try to go to one of them on Saturday evening.

Looks like we’re going to have another busy weekend. What are your plans for the weekend?

Nothing like a snow cone to help you cool off on a hot summer day. This cats got the right idea. Just look at it’s tongue though! Psychedelic!

I knew the corn would do me in, but sometimes you just gotta do it. I’ve certainly been paying for eating it the last few days.

Today I’ve had a lot of fevers. Not great when it’s super hot outside, but you know I had such a high fever when I took the dog outside for a pee at about 4 pm that the slight breeze that was hitting me made me shiver.

I shouldn’t have been shivering outside today, it was damn hot! When I was shivering outside with a fever it was 29 Celsius (84 F) and with the humidity it supposedly felt like 38 Celsius (100.4 F). Ridiculous eh?

I feel bad since it’s Chris’ birthday today. I’m sitting here like a lump when we should be celebrating.

Well, hopefully I feel better tomorrow. Chris won tickets two weeks ago for subscribing to the Danforth Music Hall’s newsletter. They give away free tickets each month to their newsletter subscribers - well to one lucky subscriber each month, I mean. So tomorrow night we’re going to see Amos Lee. He’s supposed to be a great musician however I’m not certain that I’ve ever heard any of his songs. It’s a good venue though and it will be a great thing to go out and do for Chris’ birthday.

So wish me luck that I feel better tomorrow!

What was this girl thinking?

I think this outfit would be a great “before” shot for that show “What Not to Wear” on TLC. Seriously .. look at her platform boots? Let alone what goes for hair and the wild mix of colors.

I’m sure she’s got some interesting makeup on too. It’s too bad we can’t see more of her face in this picture.

What do you think? Would you wear this outfit (No, Halloween doesn’t count)?

It’s time to start summer vacations and I’m sure that some of you might visit cities with Zoos. Wouldn’t it be great to brush up on some interesting facts about some of the animals you might see at that zoo? Or perhaps you’ve just come back from a trip to the zoo or perhaps an exotic vacation and want to find information about that odd looking creature you saw - visit Zoo Country.

There are lots of Animal Activities and Crafts plus Animal books and toys on the site. Any of which would keep your child occupied for hours as they have fun playing games, creating an animal art project, reading an animal related book or playing with a stuffed animal toy.

I really like how they’ve organized their wild animal information and pictures. Rather than organizing the animal categories in a more traditional way they’ve arranged their animal categories based on animal characteristics like The biggest animals, the cutest animals, the ugliest animals and so on.

If you love looking at photos and reading about wild animals definitely check this site out.

This weeks theme is Water

A couple of weekends ago there was an event here in Toronto called Woofstock. It’s the largest dog festival in North America.

Being new dog owners we just had to go! We knew our puppy would have a great time seeing all the other dogs and we figured we might pick up some cool items for her and perhaps even get some free promotional items (we got both).

As it turned out that was the hottest weekend we’ve had so far this month. It was about 40 Celsius (104 F) with the humidity. That was extremely hot for us and I’m sure it was even hotter for our black coated dog.

Luckily for Midnight there were lots of water bowls and water buckets around for her to drink from, however, when she dunked her whole face into a bucket we knew she must have been getting too hot. Just down the street from where she’d dunked her head in a bucket was a large fountain and other dog owners were letting their dogs go in the water. I must say the water looked murky and kind of dirty but our dog was hot so we let her jump in.

She was much cooler after her dip in the pond. Chris was cooler too because he managed to get splashed, plus on the way back to the car there was another fountain that he and Midnight walked under. (See the first photo). Me on the other hand … I never really did have a chance to cool off so I was melting. We were at WoofStock for at least five hours and there were lots of people there enjoying the festival … all of us quite warm.

Just before we were going to leave we noticed a large pool on one of the side streets. I guess they’d used the pool to demonstrate dogs leaping off of docks. I can’t remember what that sport is called at the moment - but it’s a big water dog sport.

We were hoping that we could put Midnight in the pool but they were already draining it. She didn’t mind. She frolicked in the fast running water coming out of one of the sides of the pool.

She even ducked her face right into the fast running water.

I’m sure with all the pool water she managed to drink she cured any dehydration she might have suffered from due to the high heat of the day.

I’d suffered a fairly severe allergic reaction the day before to my contacts so between the heat, my puffy eyes and squinting in the sun I was happy to go home once she was done having fun in the pool water. The festival was ending at that time anyway … Chris and I are almost always the last to leave.

We’ll definitely go back to Woofstock next year. Hopefully it’s a bit cooler next time though!

BTW this is my 99th Photo Hunt post on this blog. I also sometimes do PH posts on four other blogs. I wonder how many PH posts in total I’ve done across all my blogs?

This is truly only something I could do. I’m such a spaz!

Yeah … well … I was eating breakfast while working on my laptop. Consider this a lesson learned.

I leaned over to write something down on a piece of paper and PLOP went one half of a bagel covered in cream cheese onto my keyboard. Wrong side up of course!
Ugh!

What a mess!

I took the photo that you see above after I’d swiped at the cream cheese covered keys with a paper towel. It looked much worse before I wiped it.

I quickly realized that if I continued to try to wipe the cream cheese off the keyboard that I’d probably end up pushing it into the cracks between the keys and likely under the keys as well. So I went upstairs and I got several q-tips so I could try to clean the keys without pushing the cream cheese all over the place.

My husband was home since it was his day off. He was just shaking his head at me as if I do this every day! Then he remembered that we happened to have toothpicks in the kitchen, so he brought me the box and I started using them to pick the cream cheese from between the keys.

The toothpicks worked great!

As I cleaned the keys I also discovered that there was quite a bit of dust under the keys … well more than dust - more like dust balls and surprisingly quite a bit of my very fine auburn hair! Bleh! Who knew I was losing so much hair! I sure didn’t.

Considering the fact that I ended up cleaning dust balls from the whole keyboard I’d say that it took me well over an hour - perhaps even two hours to clean the keys. I even finished up by vacuuming the laptop and keyboard to get all the fine dust that I’d loosened with the toothpicks. Then I gave the keys a swipe with a rubbing alcohol soaked cotton ball to give it a final cleaning.

After all that, the laptop looks almost brand new again! I didn’t realize how dirty it really was. Thankfully I didn’t spill liquid on the keyboard … at least the cream cheese dried out a bit and started to flake off after a while.

Oh yeah, the puppy got in on the action too once I pulled out the vacuum. She loves that thing! So she got a vacuum too. Hey … she’s shedding - I’m pretty sure I vacuumed some of the loose hairs right off her.

What’s the worst thing you’ve spilled or dropped on your keyboard? And did you manage to clean it off?