I stayed with my grandmother for the first few days of our trip and got to help her pick out plants and flowers for her garden. Wandering through the nurseries and storing away ideas for future summers was so much fun. I learned a little more about how to chose plants and how to plan a garden and hopefully will remember a few more names next time I'm talking about flowers.

It's Thursday night and I was going to do the first of my vacation posts (finally pulled out a selection of photos and decided it was too much for one post) and discovered that, even though I wrote an entry and picked all the pictures on Monday, I never actually posted our Canada Day. My only excuse is that it was very rainy on Monday and I was extremely lazy and never got out of my pajamas (what else are rainy long weekends for?). So the vacation photos will wait one more day and you'll get to see what I meant to post on Monday morning.

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A belated Happy Canada Day to all my fellow Canadians. I hope you had a nice day. We walked downtown to see the parade yesterday morning. I'm afraid I wasn't dressed very patriotically but Rob found a red shirt to wear and I made Abby a new red and white bandana. We found a good spot to sit just before the beginning of the parade arrived. Our RCMP detachment were looking their very best and this is the first year I've seen a representative of the canine unit. The RCMP were followed by the NWT Pipe Band and I don't know about you but it never feels like a real parade to me without some pipe music.

I think Abby's favourite "float" was probably the Animal Shelter with all the dogs up for adoption being walked and a couple of puppies - too young to walk safely in a crowd - being pulled on a cart. We got Abby from the Animal Shelter a little under four years ago and can't imagine life without her. Someone handed me a freezie (watermelon flavour) and I shared the end of it with Abby since I hadn't brought her any water. We thought several times that it was going to rain but it held off and we had another nice walk home.

I still haven't sorted through my vacation pictures but plan to spend some of the long weekend working on that. In the mean time I thought I'd share some pictures of our garden. I put in all the seeds right before I left and it was exciting to see everything coming up when we got home. Some of the radishes were even big enough to eat! We've been enjoying them periodically ever since and the other day I pulled out the last ones and put down two new rows of seeds. I can already see the new seedlings popping up.

The rest of the garden is doing just as well. Pea blossoms are emerging, the carrot tops are looking fluffy, the rhubarb is taking over it's corner, and I found three reasonable looking tomato plants and four different basils at the nursery to fill up my empty box. The tomato varieties are a bit of a mystery to me. I know for sure one is a yellow tomato but the rest will be a surprise. I love working with and watering the basils; they just smell so good.