Inches Turn Into Feet
It is really humid today. In Minnesota they sometimes talk about having two seasons - winter and something a little warmer. It is not true though, every year we get four seasons. I like four seasons for the most part. Saddest thing I have ever seen in Minnesota was a guy on roller skis working out on the parkway in January - there just wasn't enough snow for cross country skiing...I mean really, why live here if we don't get snow in the winter?! The hardest part of living through winter is the short days.
Anyway, hot humid days like this are not my favorite. They make me tired and every slight movement leaves me sticky. I am much more of a cool weather girl...and so are the boys....however the crazy level in our house goes way down as the dogs are very quiet on days like today - they just don't move much. Gromit and his silly doodle hair get very curly and frizzy - he looks about twice as wide on a humid day than a cool fall day- Chewie just pants endlessly. Occasionally he will get up drink some water and then walk back to wherever we are and fall to the floor with a crash and a sigh - as though he couldn't pull that bulky black body any further. His hair gets a little added body - but not nearly the likes of Gromit.
On days like this we often sit on our back porch and listen to the water fall over the stones and turn on the ceiling fan or hope for a nice breeze to come through the screens. Gromit and Chewie lie at the very edge of the porch and the base of the door. From here they can watch for squirrels and birds and other things that play in the mini-stream and on the bird feeder. They sniff through the screen door and eventually I will look up and the nose has pushed the screen out of the base of the door and a snout is resting ever so wearily on the door itself - the nose, is twitching even while the rest of the body slumbers.
We didn't plan on having ebony and ivory in our house. At least not exactly. But when the dogs sleep on the porch back to back they are yin and yang, black and white, earth and air, with heads leaning out on their respective side of the porch door. The screen resting on the snouts wafts up and down with their breaths....We don't worry much about the boys taking off as the rest of the door is screen and if just the bottoms come off they put only inches of their noses through the screen.
One day while I was sitting on the porch playing FarmTown on Facebook I looked up to see Gromit sniffing over the water feature looking back at me from the driveway -HUH? I checked immediately to see if I had left the back door open but it was closed - and I quickly looked back at Gromit to keep in him my sights - I had one of those out of body, what the heck feelings - and then I looked down to see that half the screen was waving in the wind - Gromit had contorted that big body through the rectangle on half of the screen door and silently popped out to survey the surroundings a bit more independently.
Well - normally when I am trying to get Gromit to come to me I run the other way making him think that he is 'it' in a very exciting game of tag...but in this particular situation I had no where to run on the porch- the last thing I wanted to do was make him think that I was desperate to have him come back me so I couldn't start anything until I was sure he would come to me- and the truth was, I really didn't want him to take off after someones beloved cat or chase down one of the cute neighborhood beagles or tear through some one's garden. So I did what any ridiculous dog trainer would do - I headed straight for the meat door in the refrigerator and grabbed some shaved ham to woo him back. Didn't take much and I had him in the kitchen safe and sound.
I surveyed the situation with the screen door and realized that it was actually much the same size as the dog door I once installed for him. In was an exercise in free will for our dogs - but that is an entire post on its own so I won't go into it now. In order to get through the dog door I trained him to push the flap open with his nose. The more I thought about this the more I thought he probably was thinking that was the purpose of this screen door - a way for him to get out without having to bother me and for him to be empowered to make his own choices about where he wanted to be and what he wanted to be doing - so now, today on this hot humid day I sit on the porch with the dogs at the door and a child gate on the other side of the door that they can't push through - silly boys, tricks are for kids!
Anyway, hot humid days like this are not my favorite. They make me tired and every slight movement leaves me sticky. I am much more of a cool weather girl...and so are the boys....however the crazy level in our house goes way down as the dogs are very quiet on days like today - they just don't move much. Gromit and his silly doodle hair get very curly and frizzy - he looks about twice as wide on a humid day than a cool fall day- Chewie just pants endlessly. Occasionally he will get up drink some water and then walk back to wherever we are and fall to the floor with a crash and a sigh - as though he couldn't pull that bulky black body any further. His hair gets a little added body - but not nearly the likes of Gromit.
On days like this we often sit on our back porch and listen to the water fall over the stones and turn on the ceiling fan or hope for a nice breeze to come through the screens. Gromit and Chewie lie at the very edge of the porch and the base of the door. From here they can watch for squirrels and birds and other things that play in the mini-stream and on the bird feeder. They sniff through the screen door and eventually I will look up and the nose has pushed the screen out of the base of the door and a snout is resting ever so wearily on the door itself - the nose, is twitching even while the rest of the body slumbers.
We didn't plan on having ebony and ivory in our house. At least not exactly. But when the dogs sleep on the porch back to back they are yin and yang, black and white, earth and air, with heads leaning out on their respective side of the porch door. The screen resting on the snouts wafts up and down with their breaths....We don't worry much about the boys taking off as the rest of the door is screen and if just the bottoms come off they put only inches of their noses through the screen.
One day while I was sitting on the porch playing FarmTown on Facebook I looked up to see Gromit sniffing over the water feature looking back at me from the driveway -HUH? I checked immediately to see if I had left the back door open but it was closed - and I quickly looked back at Gromit to keep in him my sights - I had one of those out of body, what the heck feelings - and then I looked down to see that half the screen was waving in the wind - Gromit had contorted that big body through the rectangle on half of the screen door and silently popped out to survey the surroundings a bit more independently.
Well - normally when I am trying to get Gromit to come to me I run the other way making him think that he is 'it' in a very exciting game of tag...but in this particular situation I had no where to run on the porch- the last thing I wanted to do was make him think that I was desperate to have him come back me so I couldn't start anything until I was sure he would come to me- and the truth was, I really didn't want him to take off after someones beloved cat or chase down one of the cute neighborhood beagles or tear through some one's garden. So I did what any ridiculous dog trainer would do - I headed straight for the meat door in the refrigerator and grabbed some shaved ham to woo him back. Didn't take much and I had him in the kitchen safe and sound.
I surveyed the situation with the screen door and realized that it was actually much the same size as the dog door I once installed for him. In was an exercise in free will for our dogs - but that is an entire post on its own so I won't go into it now. In order to get through the dog door I trained him to push the flap open with his nose. The more I thought about this the more I thought he probably was thinking that was the purpose of this screen door - a way for him to get out without having to bother me and for him to be empowered to make his own choices about where he wanted to be and what he wanted to be doing - so now, today on this hot humid day I sit on the porch with the dogs at the door and a child gate on the other side of the door that they can't push through - silly boys, tricks are for kids!
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