yikes

sam and a dog park friend
Originally uploaded by Julep67

I've not officially been avoiding posting or anything, it just happened that over the past week, I've not been in front of the machine much.

Over the weekend, I was offline for about 36 hours while my computer had it's operating system rebuilt. It's up and running really well now thanks to Mark.

Mostly, it's been hot here. Humid too. It's not the kind of weather that inspires me to do much but laze around in a shady or cool spot and drink water or eat freezies.

We have been keeping busy though and having lots of fun with Sam. He's now at the point with his obedience training where he can go out in the front yard without his leash on. This is huge. We can open the car door and know that he's not going to run away. Most likely, he'll be on the porch, waiting patiently for us to open the front door if he does get out of our line of vision.

Over the weekend, we visited (or tried to visit) 3 of the off-leash dog parks that the city has opened as part of a pilot project. One of the parks is near our house so we went over there on Saturday morning. We'd been out doing errands and Sam was along for the ride. He was super well behaved so we thought it would be a nice treat for him to have a big run at the park. The park near our house is not snow fenced like some of the parks (the park has chain-link fencing around the perimeter because it's used for the town fair in the fall but the dog zone is not fenced off). It's also not shady and there is no water available. Now we did have our own water but it didn't take long for all three of us to have had too much of the hot sun. Sam had a ball, running back and forth between us as we walked around the park.

Yesterday, we went to one of the better organized parks. It's got a snow fenced/gates zone for the dogs, lots of parking for vehicles and a water supply (not to mention washroom facilities for people). We met some cool people and Sam met a lot of dogs. He didn't run around as much as he did on Saturday because he was getting to know the dogs. He stayed pretty close to where we were but seemed to really enjoyed being with the other dogs. Some of them were puppies from what I could tell. There were some really small dogs and some huge ones and they all got along okay.

Tonight, we're planning to go back on our way home from work. It's nice for Sam to be out with the other dogs and it's nice for us to be outside near the lake shore to catch a breeze!