Tuesday

 

We saw this tiny flower on our walk this morning. It looked like a coronavirus or something from an asthma commercial. It was all alone in a neighbor's yard, doing its thing.

After lunch and a nap, we went to the pet store to get Toby some food, and since we were close to the Achieva Dog Park, we decided to stop by for Toby to play. 

It was off from the get go. Three dogs spaced out stared at him and slowly moved in, not in a playful way. 

After the initial sniffing, all three dogs started demonstrating dominant behavior towards Toby (humping, growling, pinning him to the ground, biting his neck, etc.).

Toby tried to gamely play along, showing ultra submissiveness, which only made the dogs more aggressive. We were only there two minutes before we knew we needed to leave. The other dog owners were distracted and talking, only half-way paying attention. Clearly, the dogs had been playing together fine before we arrived. They were likely regulars. Toby was the new comer, so the pecking order had to be re-established. Toby just wanted to play, but they meant business. 

It was sad because we've seen this before in other dog parks. He came away with a gash above his eye. He never fights back. First he tries to engage them in play and when that fails he tries to run in a playful way, which means he gets chased. Then he stops when they chase aggressively. Then he freezes and gets rolled. 

John and I think we have a gay dog, not literally, but figuratively. It's heartbreaking to watch. We couldn't help having flashbacks to our own childhood. He loves to run and play in the dog park, but it's like he has a big sign on his back that says, "kick me," John says. Everybody knows it but him, and he can't figure out why everyone's laughing and picking on him.

We did some reading on passive dogs in dog parks getting ganged up on. It's a thing. The suggestion is to stick to controlled environments for playing with other dogs, where you can control who the dogs are and how they are introduced. We might have to rethink the fence project. 

This tree with purple blooms was shedding them on the driveway of a house on our walk this morning.

Purple tears.

Our morning causeway walk was nice.

It was in the upper 60s when we began and 70 when we headed home for lunch. Later in the day, it was 75 degrees.

The painting on the second condo is coming along. 

You can see one column of the old brown color on the far left.

 

A neighbor brought us the most delicious cake I've ever had. I ate it all in one sitting, before lunch. (John's on a diet, so I did him a favor by eating it.) The top was some sort of custard or flan, the cake part was porous but soft with a gooey crusted bottom. OMG. I couldn't stop eating it. I paid for it after lunch with a sugar crash that forced me to take a nap. 

 

 

 We came back down to earth with a salad for dinner, spiced up with John's curry chicken.

I used some house spray, bristle brush, and the water hose on three outside doors, a slider, the garage door, and eight windows. It's a much quicker way of doing windows than windex and paper towels.

 

I raked leaves again, getting ready for the lawn guy to do his thing with fertilizer, fungicide, and insecticide tomorrow. A beautiful lawn is not a natural thing. It makes us complicit in the Tampa Bay retention pool leak, 40 miles south of Tampa. The retention pool exists because of the fertilizer industry.

Miles walked: 10.7

Miles biked: 0