Friday, August 31, 2007

Number Six

Last weekend I moved house for the sixth time.
That's not as many times as Laura, but it's a lot for a little dog like me.
In fact, if you apply the same ratio to moves as one does to time ("dog years" vs. "human years") I HAVE moved house as many times as Laura -- and that is a LOT!

Probably Laura and I will not stay where we are now for very long, so that will mean yet another move soon, but, for now at least, we are someplace safe.

Friday, August 17, 2007

Free Stuff

I wrote in my last post about how Laura tried to give so much stuff away that the men who came to collect it couldn't fit it all into their truck. What they couldn't take with them, they left out on our lawn so that other people could see it and take what they want. There is some pretty good stuff out there.

Our two big arm chairs, for instance. When the men didn't take those away, I thought that maybe Laura and I could have them back. I love those arm chairs. Whenever Laura has to go out without me, I know that she misses me. When she comes home again, I always sit with her in one of those big chairs so she will know that I missed her too. Also, when my friend Claire comes to visit me, I sit with her in one of those chairs, so that she will know how happy I am to see her. I haven't seen Claire in a really long time, but Laura says that one day she will visit us again, and now, where will we sit?

Laura says we cannot take the chairs back though. They are for someone else now. Maybe they could even be for you!

Would you like a nice comfy arm chair? (One is even a rocking chair!) They are big chairs, so a puppy and her human friend could sit together in one! Plus, they are FREE! You can come by our house and just take them! (If you wanted to pay it forward, you could make a donation for them to a charity that you think is important.)

Our big coffee table is out there too. That coffee table has lots of wonderful energy in it because Laura has served many many feasts to good people around that table. I hope that a good person (with a big room, because it is BIG) will come and take it so it can continue its work of making people happy!

Paying it Forward

Today two men came to our house with a big truck and they took away most of our stuff. I wasn't too happy about that, but Laura said not to bark at them. She said that she had asked them to come.

Laura gave the men most of our furniture, our TV, VCR, DVD player, bar fridge and over half of her clothes. She gave them so much stuff they couldn't fit it all into their truck! Now our house is almost empty!

This is all part of Laura's Inverse Pay it Forward project.

You all know about Paying it Forward, right? If someone does something good for you, you can "pay back" the favour, "settle the score" so to speak, but that closes the cycle of goodness pretty quickly and all you have is two people who did something nice for one another. If, however, you turn around and find someone else to help, you "pay it forward", and they pay it forward and the person who they help pays it forward, etc. you create this huge chain of people doing good things which can spread all around the world and potentially make our world a better place for everybody!

Well, Laura has some very good people in her life who have done some very nice things for her, but Laura is a good person herself. She is pretty good at paying it forward. What happens, however, when someone does something bad to you?

You don't want to pay back the bad deed - doing so would make you just as bad as the person who hurt you - and you obviously don't want to pay forward something bad. Evil was introduced into the world by the bad deed and, if you believe as Laura does, that we must each one of us "Be the Change" that we want to see in the world, you yourself need to do something to try to counteract that evil.

What can you do?

As Laura and I recently learned, you can co-operate with the police and the Crown Attorney fully and still have no guarantee that the Crown will bring a criminal to justice. You cannot control anyone's behaviour but your own. You must Be the Change!

I ask again, what can YOU do to be that change?

Laura decided that one of the things she could do was not only to pay forward good deeds but also to try to counteract bad deeds with good ones. She made a commitment for the International Day of Peace last year that she would try to turn the tide of hatred into love by doing one good thing for someone for each time that something bad was done to her.

This has been a difficult commitment to fulfil because, as you may know, a lot of bad has happened to Laura in the last year as a result of the actions of Uber Creep. One of those bad things is that we have had to sell our home.

Now we have nowhere to keep most of our belongings and, instead of trying to sell them or rent a storage locker for them, Laura decided that she could implement an Inverse Pay it Forward plan by giving them away.

The men who took our stuff this morning will sell it to people who need it but cannot afford to pay for new stuff, and then they will give the profits from those sales to charity. That way, lots of people can be helped by us and Laura and I will be okay because we still have each other.

Wednesday, August 15, 2007

Booner

Yesterday I chased the orange cat!

Laura and I were sitting outside, visiting with our neighbours (our nice neighbours - not the SCWs) and along came Booner. Sauntered right up to us, like he was entitled.

Laura said I should be nice to Booner because he is a nice cat and he is our next-door neighbour, but I know that cat. I know that he is secretly in love with Laura and he thinks she is his girlfriend. But she's not! Laura is MY friend! That Booner cat, though -- he would have snuggled right up to Laura, I just know it, and I couldn't let that happen, so I chased him off.

You're not Laura's type you Booner cat, you. Laura is MY girl!

Guitar Portrait

As promised, here are the pics of Laura and I posing with the famous guitar.





Photos are by Doug Nicholson/Six String Nation.

Friday, August 10, 2007

Rain Dancing

Yesterday, Laura made me go for a walk in the rain.

This isn't unusual.

Laura likes rain, and we have had some awfully hot weather lately, and somedays the only times it's been cool enough to go for a walk have been when it was raining. I can appreciate that, and, while I'm not as wild about being wet as Laura is, I don't much mind a gentle mist to keep me cool on a summer's day. Sometimes Laura can go a bit overboard though.

Take last Thursday, for instance:

The sky had been making loud grumbly noises for quite some time, and Laura was very excited.

"Rains-a-coming," she said, gleefully.



Sure enough, the rains did come:



Laura took off her shoes so she could dance in the rain:



I danced with her for a little while, but it was raining VERY HARD!



The rain did help to cool us off.

And it made everything smell so good:



But I prefered to watch Laura dance from the safety of our covered porch:



So I shook myself dry:



Come on Laura! It's time to go in now.



Okay Laura. Very funny. Let me in now please.



All too soon, the rain dancing fun ended -- but I still had fun inside with my towel!





(Sometimes you have to pose in these silly outfits to amuse your human.)

Thursday, August 9, 2007

Mangled Mail

Apologies to anyone who has attempted to contact me or Laura in the last 24 hours and had your email unceremoniously bounced back to you. Our ISP, without warning or provocation, cut off forwarding for all of our email aliases yesterday, including mine! They appear to have lost our calendar and address book too!

We didn't even know the aliases had been lost until Laura logged into her email this morning and found no messages from the busiest mailing list to which she subscribes. She has contacted the ISP for help in getting our account restored to its proper functionality, but it's currently looking as though we'll be hunting for a new ISP in the very near future.

Saturday, August 4, 2007

Happy Birthday Cheryl!

Today is our friend Cheryl's birthday.
We cannot visit her on her birthday because she lives far away, so Laura and I made her this picture:



(I think she will like it because I'm in the picture and I am cute!)

Wednesday, August 1, 2007

Summer Heatwave

Tonight Laura and I are listening to music by Karyn Ellis because we are stuck in the middle of a summer heatwave!

It's so hot that Laura gave me a massage with an ice pack to help me cool off!



I returned the favour by giving Laura a footbath. (I know that she likes to be wet to stay cool!)



It's so hot in London this week that even our wooden floors aren't all that cool ... but the bathroom floor will do.



"It's too humid to sleep
And I'm too sleepy to move.
"



"I've got fourteen things on my list of things that I've got to do but I'm not doing any of them..."

Yes Mum, I remembered...

I have to write this so my Mum won't worry about me.

Everyday I eat special candies with my dinner that Laura gives me. Not the bad kind of candies that some humans eat that rot your teeth, but good candies that help to keep my fur all nice and shiny and soft (so that everyone will want to pet me!).



In the summer, I get to eat an extra special candy - only one per month - that my Mum got for me. It tastes really yummy and it stops nasty, gross parasite things from living on my body and making me sick. Today was the day to eat my special monthly candy -- so, yes Mum, I remembered!



Thank you!