One Less Church

Yesterday morning I woke up and took Louise out for her morning stretch. Like always, we headed half a block to the north to the church grounds. They have maintained a wonderful garden area that the entire community has used and appreciated. It's a volunteer effort that has continued despite the church being sold to urban developers.

The developer felt the need to fence off the property however - when I had Louise out for a stretch after dinner we had no access to the garden area. Now, as far as I can tell, the developer is nowhere near ready to begin tearing down the church - they are still trying to get city approval to put up their monstrous 22 storey rental tower in it's place, and well, that isn't going smoothly. Oh sure, our mayor is behind it, but the community sure isn't.

Anyway, none of this really concerns Louise too much, other than the fact that she can no longer sniff some of the areas she was used to trading pee-mails. I've put up a picture of the church in part as a reminder to me when it's gone, but I'm sure you can recognize the area in many of the earlier posts on this blog.

Now the fact of the matter is that I can't really talk about the old church more than I have. Quite simply, I don't have many Louise photos that relate. But what I do have are a lot of stroller-adventure photos. So we are going to go with that because well, this could be a long post (I have that many photos).

I guess it was a couple weeks ago now, but we decided to take Louise with us on a trip across town to do some shopping. It was going to be a bit of an adventure because it was the first time that Louise would be on the new Canada Line extension of the Skytrain. It's pretty snazzy compared to the older lines, with wider trains and new stations that still smell of freshly poured concrete.

We did have one encounter with Skytrain Security, but only because the security guard had questions for us about pugs - he was researching which breed of dog he wanted to get and they were high on his list. He was quite taken with Louise but was surprised when I explained that yes, pugs do shed. More than a little.

A lot of the shopping we were to do that day involved grocery stores, so that meant I had to hang out in front of the store with Louise. I think this goes a long way to explain why I have so many photos from that day. We were just hanging out, letting people say hi to Louise, and taking pictures.

It didn't matter though, she enjoyed the outing and was great the whole time. I think Louise just appreciates doing new things and breaking the routine every now and then. Who can blame her?

As I finish this post off, Louise is returning to another lamb bone - we had a roasted lamb dinner tonight and well, Louise is just doing her part to help out with the bones. It's kind of funny to watch the cats as they stare at Louise with awe. They know it smells good and can tell by Louise's enthusiasm that it sure must taste good, but whenever they get to sniff at a bone Louise has left unattended they just can't figure out how it is that she can actually chew through it. I know I run the risk of anthropomorphizing them a bit, but I can almost feel the jealousy from them over this one dog ability. As for Louise, well when she's chewing a bone, the only time she pays attention to a cat is if it gets too close.