When I´m Not Reading…

When I´m Not Reading is a weekly meme hosted by Missie @ The Unread Reader.

 

As I´m still staying with my parents in my lovely little hometown, my “When I´m not Reading” activities are quite different from what I´m usually doing.

Last weekend for example, my mother decided she wanted to redecorate our bathroom, completely with a new color for the walls. And since it´s so much fun to paint together, we would do it by ourselves instead of letting someone do it. When she chose the color she wanted, I began to fear the worst. The color was called Killarney Green 3E (Yes, my mother was a huge fan od McLeod´s Daughters). It´s very well... green for such a small room like our bathroom, but well, who am I to disagree. To shorten things: after we painted the whole room, she didn´t like it anymore. My dad and I refused to repaint it, so now, we have a bathroom that looks like a meadow in spring when the sun shines: very very bright green. We secretly call it the Green Hell.

Besides painting the house of my parents in questionable colors, we also indulge in something that is kind of a tradition in the region where I grew up: each year in August and early September, mushrooms start growing in the woods. Here´s what the ones we collect look like:

It´s actually quite fun, because they don´t grow everywhere and you have to remember where you found them last year. It seems like I´m the one who can remember best, so my mom and dad are always quite jealous when I find more than they do. So now, they´ve thought of something to stop me from finding more than they find: I get to take our dog. Snoopy is really a cute and fine and harmless odg, but he is part Border Collie (you know those sheepdogs? Who have to be incredibly intelligent and seem to never tire? Yeah, that´s our dog.) Meet Snoopy:

Since we don´t have any sheep to herd (who does, really?), he most willingly herds anything else that moves faster that the average human (that also includes childern. Our neighbor´s daughters had the time of their life when he decided to herd them and approximatly 10 of their friends during one of their birthday parties. He didn´t harm anyone, just herded them. He is such a clever dog. *sigh* Every since this incident, the often play Snoopy: one is our infamous dog who gets to catch all the others...) Another example are birds. And as you´ve possible already suspected, there are quite a lot of birds in the woods. And Snoopy is a very strong dog who also seems to suffer from ADD. Somehow, everytime I seem to find mushrooms, Snoopy finds a bird at exactly the same time which he decides he has to herd or whatever and drags me away from the mushrooms (he really is stronger than he looks) Needless to say that I almost never get the chance to actually collect any mushrooms. I once tried to explain to him that we´re not colleting small brown bird but small brown mushrooms, but somehow, he didn´t listen. Too bad. I still love him!