I have a lot of posts to catch up on. I’m not finished with the Scandinavia trip yet and now I have a whole bunch more that I wrote while we were in Greenland, Labrador, and Newfoundland so stay tuned. In the meantime I just wanted to note two small events that happened lately.
We were in a grocery store in St. John’s picking up some lunch. When we got to the checkout we noticed that if you bought Sober Carpenter beer you got a free glass. While I’m not a fan of the beer I love their cider. I exclaimed that I really liked Sober Carpenter and said to Richard, “Too bad we’re not in the market for it right now.” The woman at the till said, “You really like it?” I said it was my favourite cider. She told us to wait, left the till and came back with a glass. I get very excited over such things and I asked her if it was really ok. She told me not to worry, just to enjoy it, so we left the store with our lunch fixings and a Sober Carpenter beer glass.
While we were driving around it wasn’t hard to leave the glass in its cardboard sleeve in the back of the Bronco. When it came time to pack to fly home it was another matter. I took it out of the sleeve and stuffed one of my favourite wool socks inside it. Then I put the other sock over top of it. Next I put it on top of my padded jacket and laid some more clothing on top. It was in the middle of the duffle so it wouldn’t get damaged if the ends got whacked. I also thought about what a mess it would be to clean up if it did break in transit. It didn’t and I’m now happily drinking my cider out of the St. John's glass.
The second cool thing happened this afternoon when Richard and I went for a walk in the neighbourhood. It was coolish and there was a bit of a wind. As we walked through a park Richard noticed a dog with something in its mouth among the trees. He said the owner was up the hill on the gravel alley. The dog, a border collie, spotted us and made a beeline.
The object he had in his mouth was a deflated soccer ball which he dropped at Richard’s feet. Then he looked up at Richard expectantly so Richard kicked the ball. The dog caught it, brought it back, and dropped it at my feet. I got lucky and kicked it into the air at which point the dog launched himself off the ground, caught the ball in mid air and brought it back to us again. After a couple more kicks and mid air catches we decided that, although we could stay and play for hours, we had a hungry bird at home and we’d better carry on. We told the dog to go back to his human and we let the soccer ball lie in the grass as we walked past. As we did, we heard the man whistle for his dog.
Sometimes I need to remind myself to enjoy the little things.
