We have lived on this island now for eight years this week. Eight years I have been writing to you and you have read my blog 70,000 times. I thank you. I like to describe my writing style as somewhere between Erma Bombeck and Roald Dahl. You could well describe it, like my grade 8 English teacher did.. Crap. Her advice? Stop writing.

We are trying to get you a picture of Bobby and his mom or Bobby breaching. We really are, but he hasn’t been around much lately. Despite our best efforts to sit on the deck, cameras in hand, doing nothing much at all, ever at the ready.. We haven’t been able to take the golden picture yet. We hadn’t seen him lately. We heard from a friend who heard it from a friend that Bobby was seen on the east side of the island on Saturday. So we know he was still nearby.

This afternoon, as we sat down to listen to Bonnie Henry, I spotted Bobby right in front of us. And here is our story of frustration.. We took two (two!) really good Nikon cameras out on to the deck to get the elusive picture of Bobby breaching. He strolled up and down the channel and then wandered over close to Boat Harbour. We brought our cameras inside (it was kinda cold out) put them on the counter and sat down to watch him through the window. Then whoooosh.. He flew threw the air and breached not once but twice right in front of Boat Harbour. We watched through binoculars, sadly, instead of a camera lens and yet it was magnificent. Imagine.. a humpback whale flying through the air … and we watched it from our living room window. Magic.

E is painting the window and door trim inside the bunkie. It looks great. Apparently if you want to make your walls look clean and bright, paint the trim black.

Piper is probably just like all of your pets, loving having our undivided attention, 24 hours a day. We never go out, we never leave him. He spends a good portion of the day outside with us but if not, he wants to sleep in our bed. His preference is that we are in the bed with him.. His ideal day, I think, would be a few great long walks interspersed with lengthy naps in our bed between us. Picture the grandparents in Charlie and the chocolate factory, add Piper laying between them and that would be his ideal world

Which brings us to why I think Roald Dahl could be a literary influence in my writing. Did you know his famous last words

were…. Aw F*ck