Fireside Books: There's exciting news for book lovers. Fireside Books in Parksville now has a second location in Port Alberni. The BookWyrm — used books are just $5 or less. The BookWyrm, on the corner of Redford and Anderson, opens seven days a week from 10 to 5, building your personal library for less. Fireside Books at 464 Island Highway East in Parksville is a book dragon's dream come true. Browse their extensive collections seven days a week. Both locations make growing your personal library easier than ever. New and used books and so much more. Order online at firesidebooks.ca and pick up at either location. Details available online.

The Ballad of Peter & Gracie: Peter and his dog raced here and there, through fields so wide, with dreams in their pockets and stars as their guide. Every day's an adventure under the open sky. In their world of stories, time just flies by.

Peter McCully: The last bell of the school year rang at two forty-seven in the afternoon, and Peter would have told you the exact second too if anyone had asked, because he had been watching the clock since lunch. He burst through the front doors of the school with his backpack only half zipped, papers and a half-finished art project threatening to spill out the top, and ran from the bus to his house in Coombs without stopping once.

By the time he reached his own driveway, he was out of breath and grinning so hard his cheeks hurt. Gracie heard him coming before he even reached the gate. She always did. The little white dog exploded off the porch in a blur of fluffy fur, ears flying, and met him halfway across the lawn, spinning in tight, joyful circles around his legs.

“It's summer, Gracie,” Peter shouted, dropping his backpack right there in the grass and scooping her up. “Two whole months. No homework, no spelling tests, no bedtime at eight o'clock.” Gracie answered with three sharp, happy barks, which Peter decided meant something very close to hooray. That night at dinner, Peter announced his plans for the summer, which were, in order: sleep in as late as he wanted, do absolutely nothing, and maybe think about doing something later if he felt like it.

His mum raised an eyebrow over her plate of salmon. “Two months of nothing,” she said. “That's your plan?” “That's the plan,” Peter said proudly. “All right,” said his dad, exchanging a look with Peter's mum that Peter didn't quite catch the meaning of. “We'll see how that goes.”

It went exactly three days. By the third morning, Peter had slept until ten, watched two movies he'd already seen four times, and reorganised his sock drawer twice just out of sheer desperation.

He lay flat on his back on the living room floor staring at the ceiling, while Gracie lay beside him with her chin on his stomach also staring at the ceiling, as if she too found it disappointing. “This is the worst,” Peter announced to no one in particular. “The worst what?” his mum asked, walking past with a laundry basket.

“The worst day ever,” Peter said. “It's supposed to be amazing because there's nothing to do, but actually it's just boring.” His mum set the basket down and crouched next to him. “I think,” she said, “you've discovered something a lot of people figure out eventually. Doing nothing sounds wonderful until you actually try it for more than a day.”

“So what do I do instead?” “That,” she said, standing back up, “is entirely up to you and that dog. You've got a whole island and two months. I'd start making a list if I were you.” Peter found a notebook, the one with the dented corner that he never used for homework on purpose, and at the top of the first page, he wrote, “Things to do this summer,” in capital letters underlined twice.

Gracie, for her part, trotted to the bedroom door, sat down, and stared at the leash hanging on the hook. “The beach,” Peter said, writing it down. “Obviously, that one's easy.” Once he had one idea, the rest came faster than he expected. He thought about his neighbourhood in Coombs, where the goats climbed up onto the roof of the market, and the alpacas at the farm down the road.

He thought about the tide pools in Qualicum Beach, where he and his dad had once found a purple sea star the size of a dinner plate. He thought about his bike propped up against the garage wall with a flat back tire that nobody had gotten around to fixing yet. By the time he was done, he had filled a whole page.

Ride bikes to the lagoon, build the world's tallest sandcastle, learn to skip stones properly, and find out what's actually living under the dock at the marina. Teach Gracie new tricks, and have a backyard campout. Maybe visit the library for summer reading programs, and near the bottom, in smaller letters, 'cause he wasn't totally sure how to spell it, learn five words of the First Nations language from the display at the Qualicum Beach Museum.

“That,” Peter said, holding the notebook up so Gracie could admire it, “is a plan.” The first thing on the list, once his dad had pumped the bike tire up, was the lagoon. Peter and Gracie rode out early before the day got hot, Gracie trotting alongside the bike with her tongue hanging out and her tail going like a little flag.

They counted twelve great blue herons standing in the shallow water like a very patient welcoming committee. The sandcastle attempt at Rathtrevor Beach two days later didn't go quite so well, mostly because Gracie considered any tower built of sand to be a personal challenge and dug straight through the side of it within a short time of Peter building it.

Peter laughed so hard he had to sit down in the wet sand, which ruined his shorts, but somehow made the whole afternoon better anyway. They built three more after that, each one slightly more lopsided than the last, and gave up trying to keep Gracie away from any of them. At the marina in French Creek, Peter lay flat on his stomach on the warm wooden dock and peered down through the gaps between the boards while Gracie sniffed along beside him.

Down in the green-tinted water, he spotted a crab shuffling sideways across a rock, a school of tiny fish flickering like a handful of dropped coins, and something long and orange that his dad said was a sea cucumber. The library's summer reading program turned out to be better than Peter had expected, mostly because the prizes were good, and partly because the children's librarian let him sit in the reading corner with Gracie curled at his feet, which was technically against the rules, but which nobody seemed to mind.

He read about whales, then about volcanoes, then, because the library recommended it, an entire book about sled dogs in the Yukon that made him look at Gracie with a new respect. Teaching Gracie a new trick proved to be the slowest item on the list, and also the funniest. Peter had decided she would learn to spin in a circle on command, and for the better part of a week, Gracie seemed to interpret every single hand signal to simply sit down and look pleased with herself.

It wasn't until Peter's grandmother suggested using a small piece of cheese held just above Gracie's nose that anything happened at all, and even then, the first successful spin was so wobbly that the whole family applauded as though she'd won an Olympic medal. The backyard campout, originally planned as a one-night event, turned into the highlight of the entire list.

Peter's dad helped him pitch the old green tent between the apple tree and the fence, and they filled it with sleeping bags, a flashlight, and far too many snacks. Gracie didn't sleep anywhere but directly on top of Peter's feet, which meant he spent half the night unable to feel his toes, but he didn't mind one bit.

Somewhere around midnight, an owl called from the trees behind Coombs Road, long and low, and Gracie's ears went up so fast and so far that Peter had to bury his laughing into his pillow so he wouldn't wake the neighbours. Not every item on the list went as smoothly as the lagoon ride or the campout.

Skipping stones, it turned out, was harder than Peter's dad made it look. For three afternoons in a row, they walked down to a quiet stretch of beach near Qualicum, where the water lay flat and glassy in the early evening, and Peter's dad demonstrated the proper technique: a flat stone, a low snap of the wrist, three or four skips and gone.

Peter's stones mostly sank on the first try or hit the water at the wrong angle and shot sideways, which Gracie found far more interesting than any successful skip could ever have been. She would chase after each splash, barking at the ripples as though she personally was offended by them. On the fourth afternoon, Peter finally managed a stone that skipped twice before disappearing, and he whooped so loudly that two seagulls took off in alarm from a nearby log.

“Did you see that, Gracie? Two skips!” Gracie, who had not been watching the stone at all, was investigating a piece of driftwood and gave a single bark in response, which Peter chose to interpret as enormous enthusiasm.

The trip to the museum in Qualicum Beach for the language display took longer than expected, mostly because Peter insisted on reading every single placard twice, sounding out the words under his breath, until the older woman working at the front desk noticed and came over to help.

She taught him the proper way to say hello and thank you, correcting his pronunciation patiently three times each, and told him a little about the Coast Salish peoples who had lived on that part of the island for thousands of years, long before there was a Parksville or a Qualicum Beach at all. Peter practised the words the whole drive home, until his dad was fairly sure he'd had them memorised for the rest of his life.

And even Gracie, sitting up in the back seat with her nose pressed to the window, seemed to be listening. There was, of course, the day it rained, a real heavy drumming-on-the-roof kind of rain that put a stop to any beach plans entirely.

His mum suggested they treat it like a list item all of its own: an indoor scavenger hunt with clues hidden all around the house, the final prize being a bag of Gracie's favourite treats hidden inside an old boot in the hall closet.

Gracie, it turned out, was a far better scavenger hunter than Peter and located that boot by smell in under a minute, while Peter was still squinting at a clue about the kitchen clock. He decided this round didn't really count, and they declared it a tie.

The notebook page was nearly full of small check marks, and Peter had added six new ideas to the bottom that hadn't even occurred to him back in June. He had learnt that the goats really did climb onto the market roof in Coombs, that alpacas blink in the slowest, most dignified way, and that he could say two whole words in the First Nations language.

One evening, sitting on the back porch steps with Gracie sprawled across his lap in the last of the sunlight, Peter flipped back to the very first page of his notebook and read his own handwriting from weeks earlier.

“Things to do this summer.” He thought about that boring third day lying on the living room floor and staring at the ceiling, certain that summer had already gone wrong. “You know what's funny, Gracie?” he said. Gracie thumped her tail once against his knee, which meant to continue. “I thought doing nothing would be the best thing ever. Turns out doing stuff is way better. Who knew?”

Gracie, who had personally never once in her life considered doing nothing to be an option, simply sighed a contented dog sigh and closed her eyes in the sun. His mum, overhearing from the kitchen window, smiled to herself and said nothing at all. Some things, she figured, a kid had to find out for himself, and Peter had.

The Ballad of Peter and Gracie: Peter and Gracie, the finest of friends, with tales of wonder that never end. In the pages of books or stars above, they find their magic in laughter and love.

Fireside Books: There's exciting news for book lovers. Fireside Books in Parksville now has a second location in Port Alberni. The BookWyrm - used books are just $5 or less. The BookWyrm, on the corner of Redford and Anderson, opens seven days a week from 10 to 5, building your personal library for less. Fireside Books at 464 Island Highway East in Parksville is a book dragon's dream come true. Browse their extensive collections seven days a week. Both locations make growing your personal library easier than ever. New and used books and so much more. Order online at firesidebooks.ca and pick up at either location. Details available online.