Friday, January 29, 2010

A night time walk in a blizzard

When I left work today I lamented having to walk Dahlia out in the weather we're having. This afternoon it was windy, about 40mph, blowing the recently fallen snow everywhere. My coworker said "She won't want to be out in this anyway."

I walked outside with Dahlia tonight to discover it was quite the blizzard. Near white-out conditions, snowing heavily, blowing still at around 30-40mph. Lovely. Just lovely. Dahlia ran out into it like this was the BEST STUFF EVAR OMG. I was hoping for a quick pee walk and I got a dog who looked up at me with this look of "wow mom how did you bring this awesome white stuff down!!"

So off we go, Dahlia with a spring in her step, me trudging after her, hoping she'll pee quickly.

She doesn't.

And then as we're coming back around the corner, out of the whiteness and darkness, comes a guy running with two dogs off leash. I can't really tell who it is. But he leashes up the dogs and moves out into the road with them. And as he comes closer I realize it's the guy with the Rottie from down the road and he's walking our neighbor's pit bull puppy. The dogs all know each other so he lets them back off and they come back over to Dahlia.

And play time ensues.

They run around and sniff and dance (and she finally pees!). And then we go see Callahan, a wonderful yellow lab who is sadly rarely walked and usually just tied to the back porch. He's a nice dog despite all of that. Bentley and Bailey are already up with Callahan when Dahlia and I head over. She freezes and I know her next move will be to fly to them. So I call to her and tell her "slow" and she walks slowly with me up to them, each time she forget herself and starts to rush forward I tell her to slow down and she does so. Finally we reach them and the four of them run around (Callahan as best he can being tied to the porch while the others are free) Bentley (the Rottie) takes to humping Callahan, but his owner manages to stop it and Callahan calls him off. Dahlia, of course, plays her proper roll of "police dog" and when Bentley starts to hump, she barks to get his attention and distract him and then herds him away from Callahan. She really is brilliant with that. The people at the dog park love how she sort of seems to defend the dogs who are dealing with a somewhat ruder, more aggressive dog. Luckily Bentley has never tried to hump her or he might get a quick flash of the teeth. Girl knows how to handle herself and does it quite gracefully.

When we decide play time is done, I call Dahlia off and she's awesome as always, following me, though she does start to veer off to chase Bailey and Bentley who are running off in the other direction. I call her back and she's excited and it's play time!! So I toss my glove, which she promptly kills like the predator she is. And then I tell her to bring it inside to Daddy and she does. She brings it right into the house and drops the soaking wet, covered in snow, glove right on top of his dissertation papers.

I love my dog!

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