Salal

Check out my salal; a native ground cover, all around the forests around here.  A few years ago, I decided to plant some salal in my backyard.  As a substitute for the ivy, which we have way to much of.  But better than blackberries, right?  Everything is better than blackberries.  But it didn't do that great.  Well maybe because there was a lot of weeds and I didn't fertilize it.  But we had a gardener crew come today and cleaned up everything.  I had to tell them specifically to not trash the salal.  You could hardle see it.  But when they were done, look what they found.  Pretty healthy looking salal.  There's hope for it!

I declared a 3 hour vacation this afternoon.  It's been a tough week with a lot of stress.  So, the weather was nice.  We took the dog (Dennis refers to him as 'el hundo') and we went to visit a dog park I had heard about.  Very mellow vibe.  Bowen did well with all of the dogs and got to run around in the sun.  One smaller pit dog, Grace, was playing with her ball.  Her owner said that if Bowen bothered her too much, she would let him know.  Sure enough, he was trying to get her to tussle, she nipped him pretty hard.  Serves you right, I thought.  He didn't bother Grace so much after that.

Then we went over to Edmonds Beach and hung out on the Sound with the driftwood and the tidepools. 

We've been using the various gift cards, we've accumulated.  So afterwards, we went to Ivar's Fish and Chips and used one of them.  We couldn't bring him in and it was too warm to leave him in the car.  So Dennis backed up to some landscaping and we at our fish and chips sitting at the back of the trunk.  Feeding french fries to Bowen who was very good.  Pretty pleasant.

Good three hour vacation....