h.e.a.r. this!

i think ben has gas, and i think it might kill me with its toxicity!

shmushed four people into my bedroom last night for a movie; nothin' like cuddling up for a good flick. and a good flick it was.

did christian bale live up to your expectations, helen?

whilst on my lunch break today, i looked out the patio doors and noticed a woman with wild, frizzy red hair (you would have cringed, helen) lurking around our back gate... i opened the door and asked amy (who was sitting on the back porch) if she could figure out what the woman was doing. neither of us had any idea. it looked like the woman had a leash in her hand, so i thought maybe she was just letting her dog do its business. (go to someone else's yard, thank you.)

several minutes later, the frizzy-haired, lurking woman was still there, hovering around our compost bin. she lingered quite a bit longer than i figured it would take to let a dog do its business, so i wondered: could she be rummaging for something? a few minutes after that, we discovered that what the woman had on a leash was, in fact, not a dog, but a cat. shorty thereafter, she disappeared from sight, and we still have yet to discover what they were up to back there.

this morning i was greeted by this message on the fridge door:

"if my dog looks like he's dying and/or bleeds profusely please phone me as he ate a christmas light."

i like how so many of our posts centre on ben. he truly is a major part of our household. i am still laughing at the image in my head of when he was leaping up and down on the couch with the pillow in his mouth. wish someone else could have seen it....ah, ben....so naughty, but SO cute about it sometimes.

i think it's time i contribute a wee tale.

so i was walking ben today, as is my habit, down by the river. an older man walking past me said, "hello". naturally, i returned his friendly gesture with my own, "hello". he said, "um, i was TALKING to your dog". somewhat surprised, i somehow said, "oh he doesn't actually talk back". and that's it.

so amy and i were walking along broadway this afternoon, and in front of bud's were two guys, asking for change. when we approached, the line they gave us was, 'change for a chainsaw and a hooker?'

i just gave him a weird look and tried to figure out if i'd heard him right. maybe i should have given him something for his creativity.

yesterday was insane! among other things, ben was lost for over 2 hours! amy and i let him out in the backyard and checked on him every few minutes. when amy went to check the last time, i heard the dreaded words: "helen, i think we have a problem". we frantically wandered the streets asking everyone we passed if they'd seen a dog running loose. we followed barking, checked schoolyards and parks where kids were (that sounds creepy!), walked every way we could think that we'd ever taken him for a walk and tried to figure out who to call.

we went back to the house to call the spca or pound or something, and our dear elke was there wondering what happened. the last thing we wanted to do was tell her that her dog was missing for her birthday (not that it would have been better any other time). we all kept looking which was seeming rather futile but we didn't know what else to do and we couldn't just sit around doing nothing. finally, we returned to the house and tried to get on with the preperations for the birthday party, hoping we'd get a call soon.

eventually we got a call from the little grocery store a few blocks away telling us that ben had followed someone into the store so they had him tied in the back for over an hour! he had chewed through a rope and they still held on to him for us. so while we roamed the streets for a couple of hours, wondering if he'd been hit by a car or stolen, ben was in one spot a few blocks away!

so after that fiasco, we prepared for the birthday celebration and had an exhausting but wonderful evening. yay for elke's birthday turning out fabulous!

everyone is off for the holiday and i am left here, alone, in the big empty house, to freak out about every creak i hear in the night. even the dog is gone. whatever shall i do?