The weather has truly broken now, I believe. The temperature was back up to a perfectly wonderful 65 degrees this weekend, and everything is drippy and squashy and muddy. There are slushy snowmounds in the parking lots and on the shady side of houses -- which happens to be the front yard, in our case. This morning there were three squirrels in our back yard, frantically bouncing around the lawn, burying nuts. I don't know why they are burying them this time of year, but it's what they were all doing: springing about and manically burying nuts. I thought they did that in the fall but... oh well.
It was so lovely out on Saturday afternoon that I went out with my book and dragged a chair out into the sun to enjoy the warmth and vitamin-D and a good lazy read.
Roxy had other ideas.
Roxy had uncovered her red rubber ball and stood with her face inches from my knees and made ultra-sonic squeaking noises until I relented and got up to throw the ball for her. It's irritating at first, but it makes her so deliriously happy that I have to forgive her for interrupting my peaceful reading time.
At one point the ball ricocheted off the sycamore tree and disappeared into a heap of leaves that have fetched up along the chainlink fence in the back corner of the yard, and even Roxy's supernatural sense of BALL couldn't help her find it, so I sauntered over to dig it out for her.
And uncovered Hell.
I forgot that I hadn't been out to scoop the poop since before Christmas. The entire back corner of my yard was a solid mass of dog turds. Dog turds upon dog turds upon dog turds, in every stage of freshness: from just-this-morning to fossilized to pulverized. I was utterly horrified.
A short exploration across the lawn revealed two other similarly godforsaken locations. So: bye bye relaxing doze in the sunshine. I had to go get my shovel and get scoopin'. I scooped for over an hour (with frequent interruptions by Roxy who would bring me the ball and pester me until I laid aside the shovel to throw for her), and scooped up two tall kitchen garbage pails full of poop. And that was just triage. This weekend I'll have to go out and do it all over again, with an eye to the finer detail, not just damage control.
A little about dog poop. My dogs each have a particular style and a particular place they like to go. Kobi likes to stay in cover. Tall grass or ground cover are her preferred spots. Flower leaves a trail of enormous turds. She's a squat-and-walker. Roxy's contributions are always easily identifiable. First of all, Roxy eats a lot of unnatural objects, so her poops are often colorful: they were all full of blue blanket bits for awhile. But her new blanket is purple, so the hue has changed. Roxy is also something of a soft-serve specialist. She creates, as Grayson puts it: "fancy poops."
I realize this is way more than you wanted to know about dog poop, but it was something I made a rather full study of yesterday afternoon, so it's on my mind.
Also, I'm painfully reminded of all that shoveling today as my muscles begin to stiffen up from the unaccustomed work. My neck, arms and shoulders are really protesting. I'm a little bit afraid that by bedtime I'll have turned into the Tinman. I see ibuprofen in my future.
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