A spread perspective

The Instagram voting once again just proved how much you know us or how much you expect our familia to be a walking disaster. The voting was clear – everyone voted that Sunday’s bulldog event didn’t go quite as smoothly as expected, actually though… let’s not get ahead of ourselves!

Or we can just skip back in time until Saturday evening. Hydra, the home ecologist with the current compulsive need to clear our old junk out of the basement, arranged to swap our flower pots, which had been lying sadly in the basement for the third year without the slightest chance of ever growing anything alive. The swap, or the medieval exchange of something for something, was therefore agreed upon quite simply: a pot for some consumable goodies, since food, unlike pottery, is needed in more than large quantities in our house.

At 6:30pm we got rid of unwanted gardening supplies and got a paper bag with mushroom spread, pasta and cabbage. We didn’t find out until we were upstairs in the apartment, though, as Hydra the gullible took the bag and ran home. Wrong! Instead of the promised sundried tomatoes and candy, we unloaded this holy trinity of unwanted supplies into the fridge. Feeling betrayed, Hydra immediately confronted Mrs. Swapper on the instant messenger, calling this whole botched exchange, an “unfortunate coincidence” and a grumpy Hydra declared it a set up and with that we went to bed.

In the early morning, or rather in the “late” morning before the departure, the girl baked fresh toast and opened the mushroom spread to get rid of it and not remind her of the scorched exchange. When she opened it, however, its smell was like a combination of hooded sweaty socks and something that supposedly smelled like a forgotten swim in a plastic bag. The girl set the mushroom stinky thing on the counter and then looked at the lid for an expiration date that ended as summer was beginning – June 25! With a completely disgusted face, the girl took the summer mushroom treat out to the balcony to the trash bin waiting for Traitor to take them out with me.

When we were almost on our way and the trash can was waiting for us in the hallway, I went to check the spreadable butter – it didn’t smell bad at all to me, so I took a bite of it and it tasted quite acceptable, then I took a few more bites and then a few more, until the larger quarter of the box mysteriously disappeared. When the boy saw this, he rushed me away from the bin and we quickly ran outside so that Hydra wouldn’t happen to notice my transgression against etiquette, as that would results in scolding.

And so we carried out the bin, packed up for the exit and headed to the event place, where a lot of bipeds and their snorting buddies were already waiting.

And then we all set off on a five kilometre walk, which was absolutely perfect and full of terrain and climbs, which we loved. At the last hill, where the view was beautiful, I started to feel the familiar tightness in my tummy. I tried to find a private spot where I could unobtrusively take care of my business. I broke away from the group and climbed to an even more elevated spot full of beautiful heather. The bipeds, as always, totally misunderstood and thought I had found a nice spot to take pictures, so not only did I have to survive a family photo shoot with a sore tummy in my arms. I still had to pose amongst the heather, and the girl was clicking the best photo lying down from all angles so I could have a new one for Facebook. When the photo shoot took longer than the pyramid building, I couldn’t take it anymore and during the “Tokki gracefully sitting by the examined tree” pose, I loosened the reigns on all natural processes and fertilized all the heathers in the area.

Hydra, still ready to shoot, jumped up from the ground like a soldier from a trench and watched the havoc around her in shock. Meanwhile, the group was forming up for the photo shoot, and we were all just sweltering with the heat that maybe they’d come to take pictures behind us, on top of my crappy spot. We frantically searched for tissues and yelled at the others not to wait for us to take pictures, praying that the wind wouldn’t turn towards the group and bring the smell of steamy mushroom butter swimming combined with my very healthy gut flora to the entire snorting team.

By the time we had disposed of all evidence of this embarrassing event, the group was two hundred meters ahead and we caught up with them, glad that no one had seen or smelled anything.

And while we were trotting down the overlook, as an added bonus, I slipped on a white foam vomit full of treats that had been one hundred percent thrown out by one of my bulldog partners a few minutes before, as it was pleasantly warm on one paw. The bipeds nearly had a heart attack, the boy was taking out another bag for dirty napkins and the girl was wiping up the poisoned treat that had splattered all over my paw and nagging at the fact that for a moment I thought she was going to throw another pile right next to the bulldog one. Fortunately, no one saw us with this one either.

As much as I hate to admit it, I have to give Hydra credit: the spreadable butter was really expired! And we were expired after the five-kilometre walk. Moreover, the boy discovered that the cabbage and even the dry pasta were also expired, so we walked to the bin again later that evening. We’d better have planted some nice heather in the flower pots…