Dogs, Sticks and Water

I started thinking about a nap, something I rarely do, almost as soon as I got up this morning. OilMan's stentorian snoring drove me to the guest room in the middle of the night where I threw open the windows in the still warm room and crawled under the throw blanket on top of the bed. The fog rolled in during the night and I woke, cold and inadequately covered and got up, grumpy and out of sorts.

We took all three dogs to the "swimming hole" in Santa Rosa Creek and they swam themselves into a trance. Ozzie stuck to the deeper water with his stick as Blake hadn't quite come to terms with the concept of swimming in water he couldn't walk in. Eventually, he had to come back and the inevitable happened…Blake grabbed his stick, Ozzie gave it up without much of a fight and somebody threw another one.

Rudy doesn't swim, but without venturing far from the edge of the water, or entering the fray over sticks, he still managed to get quite wet.

Getting them all out of the water, away from each other's sticks and up the steep bank to the trail proved to be quite another matter. Just as we thought everything was under control, one or the other of them would make a break for the water again. 

Baths were the order of the day once we got home. Dana and I washed the dogs and tried to keep them from rolling in the dirt, while Jim went to the store for sandwiches and OilMan repaired a few more yards of irrigation tubing, Rudy continued his hunt for lizards and bees and Ozzie retired from the fray for a nap. We enjoyed our sandwiches in the sun under the yellow umbrella. 

Some days just go to the dogs right from the start….