First Day of Spring

Spring starts today after a long, cold winter (sorry, Erin, I know you just had a couple more snow days!) and Duncan was ready to celebrate.

First, we went to the baseball diamond in the park on our walk this morning. For the first time in weeks it was neither knee deep in snow nor ankle deep in mud. I wish I'd taken my camera, because he ran and ran and ran! It was so much fun. There were several good sticks, too, which had been nicely broken in by other dogs, so he chased them and chewed them to his heart's content.

As soon as we got home, he went out to explore the yard, which is rapidly reappearing from under the snow. And guess what - his rabbit buddies from last year are back! He played with them for nearly half an hour.

Perhaps I'm suffering from spring fever silliness, but I'm imagining a little rabbit track team practicing sprint starts to fake him out: "Good job, Peter! You got him all the way to the step. Too bad, Benjamin, he only jumped to the tree that time." I'm pretty sure the rabbits know they're safe down there.

Halting the Haltering

Dr-to-be Megan is home for the weekend, and caused some trouble for Duncan. She needed to practice for next week's Clinical Medicine final exam, in which she has to demonstrate various skills in examining both large and small animals.

Unfortunately for him, Duncan is a small animal. So he got a free physical checkup, which he didn't enjoy very much. Finally he was pronounced physically normal, if uncooperative, and escaped. He thought that was the end of that. He was wrong. We moved on from dogs to cows.

Apparently vets need to learn a lot of knots to tie up various parts of cows during physical exams. Human legs and arms can be used to practice the "lifting the cow's leg" and "getting the cow's tail out of the way" knots (which actually have more technical-sounding names), but human noses aren't big enough to practice making temporary halters.

Enter Lamb Chop II. Duncan's Lamb Chop II! He wasn't pleased:

Eventually, he allowed Megan to tie the halter. But he was still worried. It looked awfully tight around the nose:

So he solved the problem. If having a big nose was getting Lamb Chop tied up, Duncan would simply remove the nose:

He really does enjoy unstuffing his stuffies – you may even have noticed a few clumps of another toy's innards under the table in that first video from an earlier incident.

This Morning's Exciting Walk

First of all, I need to apologize for not posting more. Duncan's friends Owen and Cerys came for a playdate last week, and it was pointed out that I have been negligent. So here we are, back with an exciting report of Duncan's walk this morning.

It was so nice and mild this morning that we ventured off the ploughed bike path through the park, which has been our default walk since the snow came. We crossed over the creek, then stomped our way through the still-pretty-deep-and-quite-crusty snow, down the path between the creek and the ball diamond to the second bridge:

Often when we go this way, we continue along that path behind the other ball diamond and the tennis courts. It leads to Pauline Johnson school (Megan's alma mater), where there are many interesting smells and sometimes doggy friends to play with. Today, though, after we crossed the bridge, we stopped to sniff that big willow just off the path. And we noticed Something Wrong:

I took this photo later. There wasn't time on our walk. Keep reading to find out why!

A Christmas tree. In the middle of the parking lot. In March. Duncan was Not Pleased. We had to investigate. So we cut up toward the parking lot instead of continuing along the path. This was lucky, as you'll see... (The tree is the blue dot on the map up there. Keep that in the back of your mind until the exciting conclusion to this thrilling tale...)

It turned out that the tree was harmless, and in fact smelled quite interesting. While Duncan sniffed, I looked around. I noticed another dog sniffing the garbage can over by the path (the red dot).

It took a moment to realize that it wasn't one of Duncan's usual dog buddies. In fact in wasn't a dog at all. It was a coyote.

Wikipedia's version of a coyote. Ours was darker and much more handsome.

Luckily, I'm not sure that Duncan even noticed it. But I think we may need to time our walks in the park a bit later; this is the route the high school kids tend to take when they walk to school, and any sensible coyote would be sure to be safely tucked up in its den before dozens of teenagers appear, about half an hour or so after we were there.

** catwalk = walkway between the houses that leads from street to park. We had to learn a whole new vocabulary when we moved here.