Thursday, May 19, 2011

Typical Thursday Morning

It's the weekend so the dogs let me sleep in until a few minutes after 5:00. I know how distressing that might sound to some of you, "sleep in until 5:00," but that's our reality. Now that summer is here, it's far too hot to be outside after 8:00 so we need to get our morning walk completed as early as possible.

As soon as we stepped outside, I could see that another dust storm was blowing in. These events aren't true shamals (sandstorms) but instead consist of fine dust particles that completely coat every surface of plants, cars, roofs, windows, even your hair and teeth. When it hurts to blink after a few minutes outside, it is time to go back inside. We've had a rough spring with perhaps a dozen dust storms since the first of the year.

To add insult to injury, the palm trees are dropping pollen in appalling volumes. The strong winds were swirling all of those particles around with the dust.

So I quickly decided that we'd do our "short" walk route that takes about half an hour. Our normal weekend morning route takes over an hour but I didn't want to be outside for that long. And this was certainly not a day for lingering in the backyard of a vacant house to play ball.

We are happily strolling along when the dogs suddenly turned a corner next to a fence densely covered in vines...to confront a surprised black cat who was puffed up and hissing indignantly. I've been working to try to tone down Mimi's responses to the cats we see (with mixed success) but she did allow me to back her up a few feet. I bent down to pick her up (sometimes the easiest way to get her out of a situation where she is past her stimulation threshold is to simply ... get her out of it) and started walking away.

Suddenly, the cat ran up and attacked Harry! He was taken completely by surprise and didn't have time to react. I could tell the cat had made some claw contact. I stepped forward and gave the cat a bit of a kick, nothing damaging but still it was a pretty firm nudge with the foot. It decided that taking on me and Harry was probably not a winning proposition so it ran off.

I gave Harry a quick check, finding only two spots with a bit of blood, decided that everything was over, and we continued our walk.

A few minutes later, we came up on a section of sprinklers watering a green space. The grass here is watered using raw or reclaimed water (which depends on where you are in camp). The rain-bird type sprinklers are irresistible to the dogs when they are in the right mood, which after the cat attack both apparently were. They start biting at the water, click click snap, you can hear their teeth close together. Both of them became soaked in less than a minute. I usually have to call off the game once they start trying to bite the sprinkler itself!

We walked down to a relatively clean patch of grass and I let them roll around. Mimi loves to get wet, hates to be wet, so she is particularly vigorous with her rolling.

Then we headed on home where we proceeded to take a short nap to recover from the morning's excitement.

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