Dog Day Afternoon

Speaking of Fort Collins, which was the subject of yesterday's blog, I drove up there this past Thursday afternoon to take my sister Susan around on her usual errands, as well as taking her two dogs to be groomed at a local pet shop.  It had snowed all day in Denver on Wednesday, but the main roads were perfectly clear on Thursday, and so it was a breeze driving up there.  I was a little bit early, and so I walked around to the front of her place to snap a photo of her townhouse complex, as seen in the photograph on the left. Fort Collins is a nice town, one of the fastest growing cities in the U.S., as a matter of fact, but still is a great place to live.  It is home to Colorado State University, giving it a youthful vibe, and has a truly wonderful old town, dating back to the 1850s (and all you Europeans out there, please give us a break - we are still a very young country).

The first thing we did when I got there was to drop off the dogs for grooming at the pet store.  We then went about our usual routine - going to the library, the grocery store, the thrift store, etc.  We then drove back to the pet store to pick up the dogs.  I took charge of them both while my sister paid the bill and chatted with the staff about dogs for about an hour or two.  Since it was in the single digits outside, the dogs seemed to want to get in the car as soon as possible, where I snapped several portraits of them.  In the photograph on the right is Tutu, who is looking kind of mellow after getting trimmed.  She was shaking like a leaf on the way there, no doubt suspecting that something - probably not good - was up.  She is a tiny Yorkie, very shy, and of course dotes on my sister.

Blackberry (a cairn), seen looking for my sister Susan in the photograph on the left, has major separation anxieties when my sister is out of sight.  She will whimper and howl and basically make a spectacle of herself until Susan returns. When we went to Santa Fe this past September and Susan would go into a convenience store for a moment to buy snacks for the evening, she would howl like a deserted orphan, and I would have to explain to each customer going into the store that she was simply waiting for her owner to come back.  Dogs are indeed a wonderful thing to have, but they are also a truly great responsibility.  You are suddenly in charge of a living thing, and it is very much like having a child to care for.  Too much emotional responsibility for me, coward that I am.  Good luck to you with that, Susan.