A good start, a rocky ending

Eddie woke me at 6:00 AM, a very good start to the day.  Usually Mitzi is first up, at 5:30, so I got to sleep in an extra half hour.  Today was my birthday, so over coffee I opened emails, cards and presents - it is so nice to be remembered!

An' how come YOU didn't hafta wear a funny hat, Mama?

Then Eddie and I headed out for our morning walk.  The air was crisp - in the last few days the leaves have really started changing to their fall attire, and days are getting noticeably shorter.  Eddie decided we should vary our usual counter-clockwise three km loop, and practically dragged me in the opposite direction.  But before we'd gone even a block, I noticed something shiny on the street.  A quarter!

My mom used to say "See a penny, pick it up;  all that day you'll have good luck."  So I figured a quarter means twenty-five times the luck.  Perhaps I should have spent it on a lottery ticket!

We wandered down towards the beach, where the tide was very far out.

Low tide

The morning light and still waters created beautiful reflections at the marina,

Morning reflections

and in the shallows I spotted an old sunken boat.  Crofton seems to be a haven for little old broken up rowboats, and I've taken photos of many of them  - one day I'll put them all together in a blog post.

A once-prized possession left to rot.

After walking the seawalk and enjoying relative solitude in the peaceful morning air, we strolled around the park near the ferry terminal before heading for home.

I got a chuckle out of this dog's resting place atop a cement barrier:

What?  It's warm and comfy!

My friend Else took me out for breakfast (my favourite meal to eat out!), and by the time I returned home, the day was hot.  Mitzi was hunkered down in her crate, uninterested in breakfast or anything else so I let sleeping dogs lie.  I lazed away the day reading books, editing some stories I'm preparing to submit to a couple of publishers, and doing very little else.

But when Mitzi refused lunch, then dinner, and had to be hauled out of her crate to go pee, I began to worry. I should be used to this by now - about once every couple of weeks she goes on a hunger strike for about twenty four hours.  If she's not back to normal by tomorrow, I'll worry.  Okay, I'm worried now, but I'll really worry tomorrow.

Leave Me Alone!

And then my computer started acting up.  I was trying to respond to a few emails and they bounced back with a Mail Delivery System message saying that mail from my email address " matches a profile the Internet community may consider spam."   I tried three times - removing my signature blog address, changing the subject line, deleting the previous message, but always got the same response.

Cr*p.  Who the heck reported my emails as spam??????

If you emailed me today and didn't hear back, I'm not ignoring you. Curiously, some that I send ARE getting through so I guess it depends on your server.

Hopefully tomorrow Mitzi will be back to normal, the email will go through (come rain, sleet, dark of night and spam blockers), and all will be right with the world.