Some Saturdays doodle by.

As promised, rain fell all night and most of the day. For some reason I woke up this morning and forgot the things that I wanted to do. The list in my head is unreliable. Opening my eyes seemed a reasonably good start.

I never understand how it is possible to get up and ready in a little over an hour on a work day, yet on a Saturday off it can take all morning to get going. I don’t like it, I feel like I’ve wasted half the day when I allow myself to sleep in and then procrastinate about what to do first. It throws me off. Relaxing is stressful.

Our glimmer of excitement on this rainy day occurred when a stray dog ran into our back yard. Suddenly, youngest daughter is out in the rain coaxing the soggy black and white border collie to her.  There are a few dogs living round us who go for a wander now and again. This one we hadn’t seen before. It has a collar but no tag. Before long Tim’s making a make-shift rope lead and they’re off taking the dog for a walk around the neighbourhood to try and find who it belongs to.

A little while later they return – soaked and still with a dog. I’m already looking up the SPCA, but before I get the chance to call I hear, ‘We’ve found the owner!’ Phew! They spotted a woman driving slowly up the road, looking this way and that. She is grateful to get her dog back once she spots Tim and Issie with it. Apparently, the dog jumped onto her compost bin, over the fence and made a break for it. Mystery solved.

This brief flurry of activity shook me out of my general procrastination. I remembered how I’d intended to get up early and make marmalade. I’d told myself I would be up early and bake too. So now in the late afternoon, I make a cake, make marmalade and prepare curry for supper all at the same time. There’s nothing like chopping chillies, and a few minutes later licking a dollop of marmalade off a chilli finger. Hot! Orange and chilli marmalade – it could be a thing. I also put my gloved thumb into the pumpkin cake as I remove it from the oven.

There comes a point on a very rainy day when getting out of the house is a good idea. Tim and I waited out the two hours between youth group drop off and pick up at ‘The Roundhouse’, one of the many craft beer bar/restaurants that we have here in Freddy. Some friends even joined us. I should have taken a picture of the flooding river almost lapping onto the parking lot, but as is typical of today, I didn’t quite get to that.

Cheers! It was actually a good thing to relax in the end (mine was a half by the way).