Snow Days

I took a long walk with Sweetie late in the day yesterday, part of the way along Long Branch and the snow on the rocks with the water flowing black between them was just somehow very moving. I think it's an image that Kurosawa likes, too; it seems to turn up a lot in his films. I wonder what it is about water, stones, snow? We walked all the way to New Hampshire Ave below where it crosses University and then took the long long way back. The few people that were out seemed to share the same spirit of adventure and novelty I was feeling. Everybody seemed extra nice.

More of same today, took another long walk in the middle of the day, except that now Sweetie is heartily fed up with snow. There's a field near here where I let her run off leash and when she ran into it her feet couldn't touch the ground--the snow was over my knees--so she was very annoyed. The thing Sweetie hates most of all on earth ls Losing Control of the Situation. She would take these standing leaps straight up into the air to get out of it, leap-plunge. It looked funny as hell but she was not amused. After that she just wanted to get home, anybody's house would do--she kept dashing up onto people's porches which is what she does when she's out and it's raining very hard. Every snowbank was a negotiation. We've lived here for four years and this is the biggest snowfall we've seen. She didn't seem to have an opinion about snow one way or the other in all these years, but now she has apparently made up her mind that she doesn't like it. I don't expect that to change, unfortunately.

Misha went out with my Dad yesterday only to take a dump. This was the first of two outings with this purpose, and it was a failure because she refused to uh, "perform" in the snow and dragged him all over the neighborhood looking for somewhere where there was no snow, just maybe some grass and leaves which is what she likes. She is one of those dogs (usually female) who always have to make a big to-do whenever they poop. Pace up and down and find the right spot, get into position and then sort of shimmy back and forth back and forth until their mysterious and complex criteria for the Ideal Poop Experience are all met. And that's when conditions are favorable, which they weren't yesterday. There was snow all over everything. She gave up altogether after what for her is a long long walk. Dragged my Dad home, he was wet, cold, and annoyed as all hell. And then he had to go out with her again maybe an hour later when she couldn't hold it in any more and didn't care where she went. That was Misha and the Great Outdoors.