Like having a 2 year old child

This doggo....is driving me insane.  After three days of impeccable behaviour, the last two days have been sheer havoc.  Yesterday he landed me on my butt in the park, everything is kind of sore today, but I don't think there's any real damage.  My ego no longer exists as such, and there were no witnesses.  And he didn't catch whatever it was he took off after, spinning me around, snapping my left shoulder (it made a weird noise, but nothing doesn't work now, so I think it's ok), and he landing on his back, mainly because I outweigh him by a factor of 5 or so.

The good thing is, we were already past the muddy section when this all happened.  Yes, it's still muddy, even tho the rain has mostly stopped.  I think the water table is so high it won't dry out until we get a full-fledged drought.

Then this morning on our walk, he tried again to spin me, but failed.  I was more or less on to him this time.  And just an hour or so ago, he decided to try to play with Lucy, a tiny Shitzu up the block, who would mostly like to remove his face.  When he calmed down a bit, she did as well.  She's actually adorable, and soft, and silky.  But initial impressions are rough.  And she has a height advantage, her house is up a bigger hill, so she's got an impressive array of stairs to charge down in order to mount her offensive.  Kind of reminds me of the Imperial Palace in Beijing.

Did I mention inter-dog relations are fun and fascinating?  Must be some reason I didn't.

Speaking of silky, here's a pic I took right after his bath on Friday.  He got so mucked up from the dog parks, he really needed a good cleaning,  He actually left muddy prints on my bathroom mat after he hopped out of the tub. 

On Thursday, we did our first ever major-ish excursion, driving up to Union City to visit a friend.  Said friend lives in a huge apartment building on the hill overlooking Hoboken and NYC.  So, in addition to the long car ride and mucho traffic, we had the first ever experiences of an elevator.  He kind of got the idea, more or less.  And he started exploring the maze of stuff in my friend's apt, which is sort of random because there is work being done on the exterior of the building, and the dust is spectacular, so nothing is in its right place at the moment. 

Fortunately, there's a nice dog park across the street from the building, and we went over there for a while.  Not a lot of dogs; in fact, only two, one at a time, who he played with voraciously.  They had fun.

Unlike the dog park we go to near home, this one had no grass, it was filled with a sort of coarse sandy gravel stuff, like you might expect at a kid's playground.  Of course it absorbs smells of whoever has been there before, so that was a fun thing for the great tracking hound.  And the thing I like the most, which we could really use in our dog park, but I understand the myriad of reasons we don't have one, it has a fountain, with a human height spout as well as a dog height one, which is human operated - so the dogs can't run it themselves, and flood out the whole park.  This is an excellent idea, especially after having had to get accustomed to lugging a water supply and bowl with us to our DP all the time.  One of the benefits of being urban as opposed to suburban. 

I still think every DP needs a taco truck, tho.  Watching dogs play is hungry business.  But yeah, I know, you don't really want food in there, it gets too complicated.  Dogs and food, not so perfect together.

And next time we go up there, I really want to get out somewhere and do some pics of the NYC skyline.  It's pretty dramatic.  But it was very hot, and the dog was in unfamiliar territory, and it wasn't possible on this trip.  Maybe in the fall.  Maybe the traffic won't be quite so bad then.