Tuesday, September 2, 2008

Labor Day Weekend at Rokki's

I have one cousin that lives near me. That's pretty much it for my family. So it is a really good thing that we adore my cousin! It is equally great that we also adore her family. Rokki and her husband and kids live about 4 hours away on 0ne of the Peninsulas in Washington. It's a beautiful area and their house is on a dead end road surrounded by scenery and peace and quiet (at least compared to where we live!).

The one person that I trust to dog sit for Shine was out of town herself for the weekend so we had to bring Shine with us. Tigger does not like to travel so we had a neighbor come over and watch him for us.

I was nervous about bringing Shine because she has some issues with dogs she does not know. Rokki has two dogs. One older lab, Jack, that is pretty much benign and a young English Shepherd, Indy, that is pretty energetic. I was concerned that Indy would be too forward and I would have to segregate Shine the entire weekend. I thought it would not be very much fun.

After careful introductions and much micro management, the dogs developed an uneasy truce. They could hang out together and would ignore each other as long as things were quiet. From there, the situation progressed to outright tolerance by all three dogs. Eventually, though, Shine and Indy developed a comfortable and downright friendship. They not only hung out together, they played! They wrestled and tussled and kept us entertained for hours! Because Shine was able to work through her issues, she got to hang out at the campfire, relax in front of a movie, repose in the dining room and literally be one of the family the entire weekend! I was very proud of her and very happy that we were all able to enjoy our weekend. On Saturday night, she did not want to stop "doing stuff" but when we went into our room to go to bed, she went straight to her bed, curled into a ball and fell asleep. Come morning, she couldn't wait to get outside to play with Indy some more! She slept very well on the way home and sacked out when we got there.

In addition, we had a good time with family. Richard helped with a project. They wanted some storage space in their garage so Richard and Kevin (Rokki's husband) built a mid floor in the garage.













I made cheese with the girls Catherine, Brittany, and Uda. We ate a lot of good food while we were there. That's what it's all about!


On Saturday night, Kevin fired up the smoker and cooked up an assortment of food. They invited some friends over and we all ate too much food and then sat around the fire and had S'Mores. It was Uda's first time eating S'Mores.


These are the requisite pictures taken on the front step as we were getting ready to leave.



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