Friday, June 08, 2007

Hell has frozen over

Yes folks, it's true. The evil among you should don your parkas. Hell has frozen over. I'll tell you why in a minute. But first ...

Another day, another dog beach

Today we visited Ambleside dog beach in West Vancouver. Everyone is always raving about this dog beach and I still can't figure out why. The footing is horrible - the beach is covered in millions of rocks, which in turn are covered with kazillions of barnacles. If my dogs have any pads left after today, I will be quite surprised. I thought beaches were supposed to be sandy?

Icky footing indeed. Woo tries not to chip a tooth.

I have a trillion (its "Big Math" day in my blog, apparently) photos of the standard fare, which I will spare you, except for a couple of gems.

Oops - Woo mistimes his attack

Piper has a new tactic to avoid Woo, and that's to simply out-run him. She's very fast when she puts on the afterburners, and the water at Ambleside was quite shallow, so she could be speedy today. She outpaced him with little effort.

Until she lost her temper again. I blew the highlights on this photo something fierce so I played with it and made it bizarre. I love the expression of terror - of extreme terror - on Woo's face too much not to post it.

I love this photo too. Know why? Because it shows this dog leaving. This is one of those super irritating dogs whose super irritating owner comes to the dog beach, parks herself on a log and reads a paperback while her dog runs around harassing everyone else's dog. This dog stood 15 feet out in the water and waited until I threw the ball and then got to it before the rightful owner of said ball could get to it. And the owner of such a dog does nothing, because she's too engrossed in her Harlequin Romance to notice. It's a big big pet peeve of mine.

Go home Indy!! Tell your owner to get you your own ball!

This is CoCo and his owner. I don't know them; we just met them at the beach today. CoCo is super funny, because he retrieves his Kong-On-A-Rope and then runs away and hides in shrubbery with it afterward while his owner yells "CoCo! Drop It! CoCo!"


Interestingly, "Fifa" had lost its allure for Woo today. Oh sure, he played with "Fifa" but not with the extreme joy I usually see. Woo has the attention span of a gnat, so I think it's time to retire "Fifa" for a few days until Woo misses the soccer ball.

However, "Fifa" had not lost its siren song to other dogs, and since Woo abandoned "Fifa" in the shallows, several other dogs came along and did battle with "Fifa" in Woo's stead.

After Red Dog did a faceplant slipping on the stupid barnacle rocks, and after Coco's mum told me about how sometimes CoCo comes home with cuts on his nose from trying to retrieve his Kong at this beach, we moved up onto the grassy area - which, ironically, was covered in sand.

I was aimlessly shooting some pictures of Woo playing with "Fifa" on land and accidentally caught this shot. This is the closest I have ever gotten to catching on film the twisty, body-contorting devil-dog thing that Piper does when she has a ball in her mouth and someone else is playing with something else. I swear to you, that thing in the background IS indeed a dog.

Adrian complains that Piper doesn't get enough airtime. So to shut him up, here is a perfectly reasonable photo of a perfectly nice little border collie named Piper

But I am sure you are just dying to know why Hell froze over, so let's move on.

Tweed (evilbastarddogfromhell) is scared of "Fifa" - yes, it's true, 40 lbs of Tweird is terrified of 1 lb of soccer ball. It is truly pathetic. Actually, it's one of those chicken-and-egg things ... he is scared of things being kicked, and he is scared of people who kick things, i.e. teenage boys. Which came first? Now he is also scared of fields where one might also play soccer. It's mind boggling really.

So in light of The Terror Of "Fifa" and all things associated with "Fifa" you can imagine my shock when I turned around to see this:

No, your eyes do not deceive you - this is indeed TWEED playing with "Fifa" - of his own free will and without coercion or threat of a beating. Tweed is playing with the soccer ball.

So in honour of Tweed's newfound confidence, and in light of the fact that yesterday I posted a deliberately unflattering photo of him, today I give you a very nice shot of a contemplative Tweed, blowing in the wind.

And because everyone is always going on and on about Red Dog's inner poise, grace, dignity blah blah blah, I also give you:


No comments: