Mended

I love this new ear on Tiger.  What I like the most is that the new ear is celebrated!  It's not an orange and yellow look-a-like replacement ear....it's multicolored!  Mimi, job well done in my book :)  Tiger's 4 year old owner loves his new "tattoo" ear. 
Yes, job well done :)

When things we love are torn or broken,

mend them and make them better then they were before!

Good advice for life. 

Dog Walk

Thanks to the Gentle Leader, I am now a happy dog walker.  At least once a day I slip that little black strap over Olivia's nose and across the back of her head and off we go.  She still doesn't like the leash but she is a smart dog.  Gentle Leader = a walk outside.  And so, she obliges with little resistance; which is not to say she likes it, her mood changes from cocky to tame the minute she sees me approaching with leash in hand.  So be it.

As a consequence of our new leash, I have become a much more confident dog walker.   At first, even with the Leader, if a dog was coming our way I would quickly turn around and walk in the opposite direction, not just on the other side of the street, on the other side of the street AND in the opposite direction.  In fact, I would strain to look around the bend, "Is a dog coming?"  I would ask myself?  Better to avoid was my motto.  But no longer is that a problem.  Olivia just follows my lead as we calmly walk on by other dogs on their afternoon walks, not that she has a choice anymore!

Today was the first day we walked by a pack of unleashed dogs roaming the neighborhood with their owners.  Turning around was an option but I was pretty sure I could control Olivia and so off we went.  Despite a tug or two to get Olivia to move forward we were good.  In the past, we would have had a round of circus time had she been on her old leash.  Her hair would spike up, I would get tense, she would pull and bark, I would get more tense.   But not today, today we just walked on by.

"Why don't you put those crazy little barking canines on a leash??"  I wanted to yell out as the two women laughed and gently tried to manage their dogs.  "Oh, come here Scruffy," one owner cooed.  I am now like a reformed smoker.  I believe everybody who cannot control their dog on a walk needs the Gentle Leader.  The older woman with long gray hair who walks around the neighborhood with 5 Papillons on 5 leashes, smiling all the while her tiny little dogs growl and bark, straining on their leashes in attack mode.   You, too, need the Gentle Leader, I think to myself, at least one for your crazed pack leader dog, and clearly the pack leader is not you!  Today I had to laugh as a man was being walked by his large lab mixture.  He nearly tripped trying to keep up.  Yep, that duo needs the Gentle Leader, as well.  

Who knew Olivia would become a model dog, walking around the hood like a sociable, sweet and well-behaved little pup.  

Jump

 

Last night around 5:10pm my husband and I were rushing in slow motion across one of the three bridges near our home.   We were trapped in a downpour.  A torrent of water gushed down on the top of our car like a giant water balloon, slashed wide open.  The windshield wipers were on double time.  Traffic was backed up.  We were trying to unemotionally discuss a situation involving a tenant who broke several expensive items in a house we own.  They don't pay the rent on time, won't pay late fees and are arguing with us over a new lease.  We were debating whether or not it was worth evicting them.   Big drama.   

While I texted our friends, "We are running late!" a man jumped to his death from the high level bridge, not 1/2 a mile away. One moment he was talking with a state patrol while straddling his bicycle high above the river, and a split second later he threw his wallet over the safety rail and, jumped.  Had one of us turned our head and looked through the rain at the bridge just to our right, we would most likely have seen him fall.   

Today I was walking our now-well-behaved lab across a little bridge leading from our island to the mainland.  I looked over at the tiny house we used to live in, right next to this bridge.  I remembered one early spring morning I looked out our back door to see a gentle dusting of snow, powered sugar I remember thinking, covering our yard and dock.   There was a knock on our front door.  Somebody had jumped off the little bridge.  As my husband and I looked out at the river scene, a lone turquoise life cushion was floating up river, carried by the strong Piscataqua current.  We later learned that the blue cushion had been thrown just down river in a futile attempt to save the young man.  He grasped for it, appearing to have a change-of-heart, and then slid into the deep green river. 

I have had my moments.  No doubt.  As a child I was mostly not happy.  In fact I have a strange amnesia when it come to remembering much about my life as a kid.  And, I wondered if it was all worth it through much of my adolescent years.  I might have even wondered what it might be like to end it all.  However, I can gratefully write that as an adult I have found happiness. 
 

We are sitting in traffic with no idea when our wheels will turn again, it's raining outside like a son of a gun, we are late for an appointment, we have a disagreement with a tenant.  Such small things in life, really.