rumiNATION

May 9 - "Something You Do Every Day"

Some five or so years ago, we got a dog. For the first several weeks we owned said dog, I took her for walks in the morning and at night - dutifully chanting, "Just go poo... just go poo...." as I'd read in some masochistic dog training book. Once she got the knack of going outside, walks sort of segued into me opening the door and waiting for her to do her thing and come back. Our frequent (read: almost daily) trips to various disc golf courses filled the exercise need in Jessie's life and everything was grand.

But then the great snows of Winter 2011 fell upon us and disc golf was made difficult, if not impossible. So as a means of filling the void, Jessie and I started taking walks again. Mostly around the neighborhood - a veritable cornucopia of streets and alleys - but occasionally down through the John Heinz wildlife refuge as well. And all this walking led to a very horrible thing - I now have a dog who doesn't just like going for a walk each day, but rather a dog who needs to go for a walk each day. If we miss it for whatever reason - be it busyness or be it torrential downpours - bad things happen. Not during the day, mind you. During the day we can sit on the couch watching Netflix and dozing in and out of sleep. But then around 9:30pm, she becomes what we like to refer to as "crazy dog". This manifests in multiple ways - including, but not limited to: running figure 8 laps between the dining room & living room (around the table and up over the couch), attempting to murder stuffed animals and lick attacks (which are normally sort of gross, but when your dog consider cat poop on of the 3 major food groups in her life - so much worse).

So anyways, that was a long story for a simple sentence. What do I do everyday? Walk the dog. (And if I happen to miss it, God help us all!)