I can’t believe that between the time we moved to Texas in June 1990 to the time we moved to Colorado in November 1992, we acquired five dogs. We had been without a dog for many years, and we sort of went overboard when we finally had the space. We had gone back down to zero for a month before we acquired Dudley, our Rottweiler cross, and Lody, our smooth Collie a few months later. Somewhere in the course of five dogs, we had decided two dogs were quite enough.<\/p>\n
I have been remembering what it was like to have a large pack because we do again, temporarily. My sister-in-law is traveling, and her regular dog sitter had other plans, so Lily and Lightning are staying with usfor ten days.
\n
\nLily is a sweet, gentle Golden Retriever who has one basic plan for dealing with life: when in doubt, roll on your back and wave your paws in the air. She is in doubt a lot of the time, so we get to see a lot of Lily’s belly. And yes, I know it is confusing that my mare and my sister-in-law’s dog has the same name. We manage to figure out to whom we are referring to most of the time.<\/p>\n
Lightning is an impeccably well behaved Sheltie. He is quite friendly and outgoing, but not quite as clinging a dog as Lily. This is a good thing, because the excitement of the guests has made Lody revert to some of her clinging ways as well, and I occasionally feel plastered with dogs just between Lody and Lily.<\/p>\n
The dogs all know one another because Lily and Lightning come out when my sister-in-law and her family visits. All the dogs get along well with other dogs, though Dudley and Lightning seem the happiest with the mob scene.<\/p>\n
I took all four dogs with me when I took my walk this morning. Lily and Lightning are used to being off-lead on walks. They both understand Elaine’s first law of dog walks: “It is as much as the dog’s job to keep track of the person as it is the person’s job to keep track of the dog.” We had a lovely walk, and since both Lily and Lightning are higher energy dogs than we are used to, a daily three mile walk should help them manage their energy levels while they are here. Unfortunately, Lightning’s soft and silky Sheltie coat attracts burrs and needle grass like velcro, and I had to spend more time picking stuff out of his sable coat than the other three, much larger, dogs combined.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I can’t believe that between the time we moved to Texas in June 1990 to the time we moved to Colorado in November 1992, we acquired five dogs. We had been without a dog for many years, and we sort of went overboard when we finally had the space. We had gone back down to … Continue reading Dogs<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":4,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[112],"class_list":["post-392","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life","tag-dogs"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s4Npw-dogs","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stardel.com\/fiveacres\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/392","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stardel.com\/fiveacres\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stardel.com\/fiveacres\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stardel.com\/fiveacres\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stardel.com\/fiveacres\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=392"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.stardel.com\/fiveacres\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/392\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stardel.com\/fiveacres\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=392"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stardel.com\/fiveacres\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=392"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stardel.com\/fiveacres\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=392"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}