The daily walks

The house at Pleasant Grove under a clear blue sky.

Sunday I went back to Pleasant Grove for our daily walks. It's not as exciting as going someplace new, but it's close by, which gave me the option of doing two separate walks thereby getting more dogs exercised and still leaving time for some yard work.

Indigo (left) and Hunter (right).

Clay was home so I left him in charge of Maya and I took the two Danes first. They were pretty easy to walk together, no one pulls, and several people stopped to tell me how beautiful they are. We logged something over 2.5 miles. They were definitely more relaxed around me on the walk than they are at home, so I hope we made a little progress toward trust and bonding.

I took Indigo and Hunter back home and picked up Maya and TJ for a second hike of just over two miles. No excitement, nothing new, but they were both glad to be out and moving. I did some brushing on them both as it looks like TJ may be beginning to blow his coat.

When we got back home I gave Rugger his "belly bath", basically washing his underneath side where all the nastiness is and the fur isn't. I used a coal tar shampoo first and left it on a good 15 minutes or more, just letting Rugger run around the yard as I was weeding. Then I rinsed him off and applied the anti-fungal shampoo and left it on another 15 minutes. After the final rinse I let the other shepherds out of the dog yard so Theo and Max joined Rugger in running around the front yard as I did some mowing and weeding in the garden. That got all the dogs who needed it some pretty good exercise today. It was another pretty one as you can see from the pictures. We rarely have sky this blue in Virginia in the summer.

If he blows his coat like he did last year, down to almost
bare skin, we are in for a very furry summer in the house.

I'm not sure what was so interesting here.
The fur on the ground is some that I just
brushed off of TJ.

These are two large magnolias in front of the house at
Pleasant Grove. They don't show up well in the picture, but
there are many large white flowers scattered among the leaves.