Lazy Saturdays

Last night Chase and I went to bed at 10pm and didn't wake up or really stir until 9am this morning. A whole 11 hours of sleep! What a lovely thing that was. My weekdays are so jam-packed that it's inevitable that I'm sleep deprived by Friday so it's really lovely to just have nothing to do on Friday night. We ordered Papa John's and watched Up in the Air with George Clooney. I fell asleep through bits but it was an amusing story. It's on youku.com for any of you out there willing to watch it for free. It's a Chinese site but don't get too scared by all the characters. Just type in the movie you want to see and voila!

This morning I made breakfast and talked with my sister on Skype. Then I sat down at had two whole pots of tea and scoured the new City Shop site because you can select groceries from there instead of using their catalog and emailing in your order. If you don't know what I'm talking about, City Shop is the grocery store from Shanghai that we order our groceries from each week. And it gets delivered to our doorstep. This is because there is very little choice in the way of cheeses, dairy, and western products in Hangzhou. I have found a good grocery store that I go to for organic produce, but City Shop has everything else.

When I was done with that, I showered and Chase and I went out looking for my birthday present. What we expected to find was a bike at the bike store so that I can ride around the hills in the area and around the lake and along the canals with Chase, but instead we ended up with a scrapper. When we got there the store was closed and we were looking around and along came a little scrapper dog. She began to eat some bones from a chicken wing that someone left on the ground and as we started to walk away from the bike store, she stopped eating and followed us. Well, more like she really followed Chase. I mean, she loved him. He stopped, she stopped. He went, she went. He whistled, she came running along. She followed us and we thought she would eventually stop as she started to look thirsty. But she walked beautifully off leash, crossed the crosswalks, and kept at our heals. That was until finally, we came across a couple who had a long-haired chihuahua. She became distracted and figured they were more exciting than we were. So just a few blocks before our house, a few blocks from being a part of our family, living life on the 14th floor of Lan Ting Guo Ji, she gave up to perhaps join a family that already had a dog and would care for her.

To be honest, it was a relief. I wasn't ready to have her in my life yet and Chase and I both came to the conclusion that as cruel as this may sound, we would like to choose the pup that we might eventually have. It seemed like a burden to get a dog when we weren't prepared. We discussed that we didn't even have food for her when we eventually would get home. We also could see that she had just had pups and have an un-neutered dog would be messy about every month, and what would we do about that? Maybe she knew that and didn't want to risk the long journey. Who knows. We hope that the old couple that she followed away from us were dog lovers (they did already have one, didn't they?) and would feed her a meal this evening and maybe even take her in forever.