Dog Walkers

This has been one slow week. Nothing exciting has been going on around here—just the same old everyday routine. Ben just finished his third night on call last night. He’s doing really well. I don’t know how he does it, really.

I’m a little short on blog-worthy material this week (as you may have guessed) so I thought that I would share our dog-walking story. Ben and I were going to go for a walk the other evening and decided to ask the neighbor if we could take her dogs out for a walk. We’ve always wanted a dog, but we live in our tiny little apartment and it just isn’t practical for us right now. Anyway, she has two large black labs and we figured it would make our walk more fun and they could use the exercise, too.

Well the first couple of blocks were just plain awful! They were jumping up, biting the leash, and jerking our arms off! Thankfully, they settled down and walked well for us. Almost immediately, one of the dogs made a small "deposit," shall we say, in some gravel in one of our neighbor’s yards. Ben and I, being the inexperienced dog people that we are, of course failed to bring along a collection device for doggy poo. We told ourselves that it was no big deal; we just made a mental note to come back to pick that up after we returned. Unfortunately, one mile later we had a larger problem. Ben didn’t realize that his dog had tried to stop so he just kept on walking. By the time he figured out what was going on we had four or five big piles along the sidewalk—downtown and right in front of the sheriff’s office. Are you kidding me?? What are we supposed to do now? We’re a mile from home and have a hefty, disgusting mess to deal with and we definitely can’t just leave it, especially not in front of the police station. We looked around and found a piece of trash that Ben could use to pick up the poo. So one by one, Ben picked up a piece and walked it down the block to the nearest trash can, while I stood by and watched. It’s kind of funny now, but at the time we couldn’t believe the bad timing. Luckily we finished the rest of our outing without incident and picked up the first “problem” on the way back. Next time I think we’ll be a little bit more prepared—and not walk in front of the police station (just in case!)