les chiens

terrier mix and retriever extraordinaire

I slept in this morning by nearly an hour. It's dark these fall mornings, we don't actually leave for the beach until nearly 7:30 because we like to wait until the sun has almost risen over the horizon just to make sure all the nocturnal creatures have made it home safely. I do walk with a terrier mix each morning, and she does love to spy a creature, and she has incredible site hound eye sight. Yesterday morning we (Jake, Winnie & I) were all sauntering along on the sand flats, in our quiet walking meditative state, when suddenly Winnie Dixon took off like a shot - a high speed launch, I'm quite used to these events, so I immediately began scanning the landscape and sure enough off in the distance, standing on a rock - was a beautiful red fox. I don't worry too much about foxes, what I don't want to run into is a raccoon (that's always a possibility). Winnie will chase the fox up the cliff and into the woods, and the fox will outrun her fairly quickly, and then she'll come rushing back to us tongue hanging out of her mouth, panting and her eyes asking Did you see that?. She can't help it - she is a terrier-mix, it's in her DNA.

Just as Jake lives to retrieve sticks from water, and when we're finished with the stick fetching part of our morning routine, he happily carries his stick the rest of our long walk. From time to time pausing, dropping the stick, to sniff some interesting spot or to snack on a dead crab, but he always picks the stick back up and we continue our walk until we've reach the car again, where he finally dutifully drops it to the ground. That's his job, not only to retrieve from water but to take the stick to the car - and he takes this all very seriously.

12 page newsletter is my main event this weekend. Thankfully I've left the overwhelmed by the amount of information (text & images) that needs to be organized phase and entered the trance like - pleasurable, big jigsaw puzzle design phase. In other words it's now fun in a weird sort of way and I am determined to remove this job from my plate by the end of the weekend. It's going to rain, so it will be the perfect way to spend this rainy last weekend in October (how can that be ?).