Riding with the Queen

So here is my co-pilot,my navigator,my passenger, my eyes-on-the road,my riding companion,
my girl, my queen,Pepper.
She loves to watch the road ahead.Not for her the traditional dog position with head stuck out of the window.She is up-front and ears back.What you can't see is the lake of drool that falls from those chops as we motor along.I have taken to putting a plastic bag over the seat and console because I was getting embarrassed as people climbed into the passenger seat only to see suspicious wet patches and puddles of mouth water pooling. So here we are off to park for a walk and a sniff and a poop and bark and a wag and lolling of tongue.Nothing could be better on a nice day.And while we were there check out the wicked wild life we found in a stream that feeds into the park's big lake. Snapping Turtle.

Big enough to pull down a duckling and mean enough to have a go at the parents too. Of course Pepper didn't notice. Too busy getting a sniffing high from a bunch of weeds growing at the edge of the stream.That Turtle was looking a little hungry though. Wonder if he's be ambitious enough for dog?

mad englishmen and dogs again

It was 90 degrees.Fahrenheit. 90 degrees. I didn't know my tongue could loll out so far.
But when it's 90 degrees and you have no sweat glands and a guy pulling on your leash like its
a brisk day in April your body does weird things. I like a good walk.I do. And when he got out the going-in-the-car leash I was all for it wagging my tail and everything. But man when I got out of that vehicle it was like walking into a fire.I was all ready to wrap it up after five minutes.Poop,pee,sniff sniff sniff ok I'm good let's go.But oh no. Mr Madman has to do the full thirty five minute loop and inch by inch that tongue of mine was sliding out and flopping from side to side. He wasn't the only idiot out there with a dog.There were others and I'll remember them.I'm goiung to give them a good growling at next time I see them. How I made it back I do not know.I do know I left a lake of drool all over the console of his car.Not that its going to stop him. The weather tomorrow is due to be as brutal as today and I know he's going to want to do it again. I shudder at the thought. Not that he looked like a cool dude out there.He was sweatin' ugly I tell you. Red face,patches on his t-shirt,perspiring big blobs of sweat water. Yuck. But better than seeing him with his tongue out I guess. Oh my goodness am I ever going to cool down. It was 90 degrees.I can't believe we went out in it.

sleeping dogs lie.

I'm tired. I'm very very tired. Can't you see that I'm tired? I'm also hungry. I know that I ate the whole bowl of food you put out an hour ago but that was an hour ago and now I'm hungry.I'm just too tired to do anything about it. So I'm just going to lie here until I see you move towards anything that could be food and then I'll get up but until then I'm just going to stay right here.This rug is really comfortable.And cool. It's very humid outside and rainy and yucky. I like it better here in the air conditioning.I think i might close my eyes now and dream about those dogs we passed in the park yesterday.Those two big ones.One was a German shepherd and the other was a Malamut. Both of them
combined wouldn't make a half-wit. They thought they were so big and bossy and bark bark bark. Pricks. They were typical dogs.Oh look at me pee up against this tree.I would have barked back at them but I was so tired after walking in that heat and then it was going to rain and thunder.I was glad we were heading for the car while those two jumped up fur bags were just starting out. I hope they got soaking wet. Nothing like seeing those kind of dogs soaking wet.They look pathetic.So anyway,I'm going to snooze a bit now.But if you go to make a sandwich I'll be right there.But right now I'm just going to close one eye.Just one eye. Because I'm sooooo tired.

Doggie down

She looks like a Damien Hirst art piece doesn't she?  #25 Mondrian goes to the dogs.
The poor girl is a victim of her medication. It seems like so many humans, dogs can have
seasonal allergy issues too. Living in a swampy jungle with all kinds of flowering seeding and
spore-throwing plants she got an attack of the itchies which started her licking her lady bits until they
were red raw. After a few Benjamins spent at the vets she is now on a course of Prednisone and the effects are quite dramatic. Had I bothered to google it I wouldn't have been so surprised but she immediately started eating like a horse,drinking bowl after bowl of water and peeing like the boy statue in that Belgian fountain. To offset the potential for rapid weight gain I've been walking her long and regularly which results in what you see in the picture above. Collapse. That is until someone,anyone touches a bowl,opens a drawer or the fridge door or heaven forbid tries to prepare or find food for themselves.Like a zombie brought back to life  she then leaps into an animated frenzy followed by a
visual attack of the brown eyed guilts beamed straight to your heart when you don't give her more food.
Its a look that looks pitiful and at the same time menacing.Like she's thinking `I'll wait until you're asleep and eat your heart right out of your chest you mean bastard!' Not that i believe she's really thinking that. At least I hope not. Hmmmm! Looking at the side effects of Predisone I do see that behavioral change is one of them.Unexpected behavior change at that. The rest of the side effects read like human drug side effects ,leaky discharge,erections lasting more than four hours and death. Not really. Well I guess yes to death. When did medicine become so life threatening? Uh-oh she's waking up. Where did I put those doggie snacks?

Driving Miss Crazy part 2

 I have created a car monster. Pepper is now addicted to traveling in my car. She recognizes  the harness I use to lock her onto the back seat and goes into a tail-wagging frenzy if I even touch it.
She leaps into the car and stands up on the front console like a Star Trek captain.The whining and
strange yowling has subsided only to be replaced by a waterfall of drool. Unfortunately for me she doesn't understand that I might need to use the car for things other than transporting her. So now I am forced to sneak out or be faced with doggy disapproval staring out of the window at me.And when we do go walking my previously tireless companion now has a limit of a half hour and no longer. At that time she starts pulling me in the direction of the car.If I decide to keep walking then she puts her brakes on and has to be dragged,claws scraping on the ground,which makes all the little kids in the park point at me like I'm a dognapper.And if I happen to be busy during the day and have no opportunity to take her out she will literally dog me around the house or sit near me with a weary chin on the ground expression until I cave in and go get the harness. I see people driving around with dogs and their pets all seem to like sticking their heads out of the window. That's what all dogs are supposed to do.And very cute. Why can't mine be cute like that? No she wants to be in the driving seat. I have created a monster.

Parking mad

 Pepper and I love parks. She adores the interesting smells on twigs, blades of grass, tree trunks. And she loves dropping a pee every 20 paces and a humungous poo just when

a nice lady is walking by. I love it for the nut balls I get to see. One day it was a guy

practicing juggling. throwing 6 and more balls in the air and dropping most of them. Continuously.A sort of Cirque de failure and quite entertaining.

Then on another day a buff young man and his girlfriend were acting very suspicious and I thought they were here for a mid-day make-out session but on my second occasion of walking past them I saw they had tied a thick rubber rope between two trees and were practicing tight rope walking. They were more successful that the juggler but not by much. And then there was the lady with the dogcart. She had a Doberman the size of a small horse harnessed in this little trap and was teaching the dog to respond to the reins before jumping in and trotting around the parking lot. And speaking of the parking lot there is the gentleman above who either has a very heavy chair that he can’t move any further than he has or he truly prefers sitting in the lot and not the park. A bugaphobe perhaps? Grass allergies? A love of asphalt? He’s not that far removed from the great British sunbather who sits along beach promenades the world over in all kinds of weather and wears a knotted handkerchief on his head for sun protection. When I see minor eccentrics like I see in the park I get all nostalgic for when I lived in Manhattan and would walk through Central Park which was more like central casting for `unusual’ people. I recall a woman with cat on a leash standing with her upraised arm beside the tree in whose branches little kitty has climbed and was now soundly sleeping .Then there was the red faced man with the boa constrictor which looked a little too tightly wound around his neck.There was the old woman with 2 Cockatoos on her shoulder who swayed like hula dancers maintaining their balance as she shuffled from garbage can to garbage can. And then there was the man with the Shetland pony causing one guy to ask me `what kind of dog is that?’ The sights didn't always involve animals.I remember being surprised by a man high up above me in a tree playing a violin.And by an older woman walking on her hands through a busy crowd and nobody giving her a second look.Or the time I saw a character dressed as Christ carrying a prop cross and being followed by three guys dressed as roman soldiers.Again nobody even blinking except me. My new park may have a lesser league of eccentrics but without them it just wouldn’t be worth the walk. And Pepper agrees.

Driving Miss Crazy

There she sprawls in the sunshine all relaxed and sleepy and butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. But just an hour before she was a very different animal. A crazy beast on wheels. And here’s the reason. I have a leash that clicks into my car seat belt lock so I can drive her places safely. Or so the theory goes. However the leash is a little too long or the distance from my back seat to my front seat is too short I don’t know. All I do know is that when she is clipped in she can stand on my car’s console and be right there at my shoulder. And that’s exactly what she does criticizing my driving by whimpers and mini yips and impeding my driving by leaning on me and licking my face. I don’t know if you have ever had a full facial dog licking while driving at 40 miles per hour but I can tell you its a little hazardous. The speed cop we passed didn’t look too impressed but thankfully he stayed in barracuda mode and let me go by. Every time I turned Pepper leaned on me and at 70lbs that’s a significant weight making my steering the slightest bit wonky. And then it’s more howls yowls and doggie equivalents to having a nervous Nellie passenger telling you to slow down, slow DOWN, SLOW DOWN!

The weird thing is that on our return journey –we had been to the park for a walk-

she just hunches down on the console and makes no noise at all and my face stays

unlicked. Crazy are the ways of the hound.