Dead Calm

We are now going to leisurely walks in the morning on lead through the neighbourhood instead of off lead in the woods - much to Raimi and Esme's annoyance and to Leeloo's relief.  She is finding it more and more tiresome to drag herself along on walks and although I can tell she wants to go, once we are out and walking she looks at me like 'I can't wait to get home to the couch'.  If we are in the neighbourhood at least I can take a short cut or two to get home instead of having to go all the way back to the truck and then drive home. She is also not exactly in shape to jump in and out of the truck either and I am not in shape to be lifting a 100+ lb dog into a vehicle!

It's also been raining so much lately that I have to at least try to keep Esme as dry as possible, even with her coat she still gets a bit wet. Esme doesn't like being wet and for a dog with a lot of coat this is inconvenient. She gets damp from the grass even if it's not raining so walking her on the street will keep her a little drier than the woods. She tends to pull out and chew off wet cords which, by the way, take months to grow, so to have her systematically removing them just because they are wet is not acceptable. I need to get her a terry cloth robe or something to put on after a walk until she's dry but that will just have to wait, for now we just avoid wet grass and walking in the rain.

Boy is getting hives from mosquito bites - I'm not sure why since he's never had them before but the hives are going down each time we go out so he seems to be building a bit of a resistance to them. He is going a bit stir crazy without being allowed to roam the woods so this morning I let him off lead in a school baseball diamond and he went koo-koo banana and raced around like a 10 month old puppy. He had a marvelous time and burned off some excess steam with Esme hot on his heels. Leeloo even did a few play bows and bounced around before remembering how fat she is.

We also cut through a graveyard which looks to be one of the original graveyards in the town. There were stones marked with dates of death in 1755 and I noted another one from 1811. Three and four hundred years ago there were people fresh off the boat carving out lives in this New World and literally dying in the effort. To the people who have lived here their whole lives the graveyard is probably just that, a graveyard full of old tombstones and very large well fed trees but to me, an Alberta girl, they represent a hard fought beginning that the town doesn't seem to appreciate.

Anyway, enough of my maudlin musings, the point is our walks often take us to interesting places and I get to see things that I would not likely see without them. So even though we have to scale back our adventures while Leeloo grows babies we can always find something to ponder as we stroll through life.