camping!

it's been two weeks, and i haven't written about camping yet! i'm a slacker!

rose and i went on our annual camping adventure to Rainbow Ranch with our friends. it was an absolute blast. the weather was gorgeous, the sunsets were incredible, the beer was cold, and the marshmallows were hot. i couldn't have asked for more.



as usual, i took my dog, who is a hyperspastic labrador retriever. she is six years old, and most people still think she's a puppy because she's just so... juvenile. i also had my sister's yellow lab, orenda, with me. when we were in the planning stages of this outing, rose asked me how orenda did at camping... which caused me to laugh until dr pepper came out my nose. then i referred rose to my sister to ask how well orenda handled camping, and my sister laughed until caffeine-free diet coke came out her nose. she gently explained the situation, orenda had never gone camping because my sister is not the sort of woman who goes camping. seriously, the only camping my sister has done since she was about 10 is the kind where your parents send you off to a college campus to play basketball for a week over the summer. so, in spite of the fact that she had to sleep outside for, like, the first time in her whole life, orenda seemed to enjoy the camping, too.

we played in the lake with the dogs most of the day saturday. because we are the place where stereotypes come from, our little lesbian tent town had as many canine residents as it had humans. there were dogs everywhere, and they all splashed in the lake, chasing each other and playing fetch. even the pug! the dogs were so tired after two solid days of swimming that they slept for two solid days once we got them home. it was bliss! orenda somehow managed to lose her collar in the lake so we faked a leash and a collar out of some rope that i had in my truck. she looked like a real redneck dog for the rest of the weekend. :)

speaking of pugs, did you know that if you squeeze a pug's head its eyeballs will pop out? yeah, i think that's an urban legend, but the girl who brought the pug was just dog-sitting and she had a long and ridiculous list of instructions to follow regarding the dog's care. basically, it boiled down to this: DON'T TAKE A PUG CAMPING! but the pug had fun and probably felt more like a real dog that weekend than it ever has in its life. we started discussing all the things pugs can't do one night around the campfire, and with the assistance of a little creativity and some BEvERages, we came up with a photo essay. from this photo to shot 35 from that album, we illustrate all the things one should NOT do with a pug. also, you should not do this or anything on any of the next 14 or so shots with a pug. there's a lot of overlap between those two galleries. if you're only going to look at one picture, it should be because at this point, i think the pug was a little tired of the traveling gnome game we'd been playing with it. if i knew how to LOLCATS that thing, it would say "we are not amused."

and that was my rainbow ranch camping adventure. thanks to sylwester and julie for the photos!

quote of the weekend, which actually came after the weekend was all over:

Why do we turn into circus seals around you?

i dunno. maybe it's because i laugh real hard and throw sardines when i'm amused?