Foster walk

At great risk of incurring Della's wrath, or at least her disappointed judgment, I went walking this evening without her, taking Oliva and Rita Rottweiler in her place. I've walked them individually with Della or Maya but only once that I recall and I had never walked them together. How they walked said everything about their personalities.

Rita started out walking a leash length away from me, far to my right. When we got to the main road through the park I had to rein her in and get her onto my left side so she wasn't walking down the center of the roadway because there were a lot of baseball people leaving in their cars at that time. I pulled her over to my left, which she didn't really understand but did accept. I also shortened her leash to about 3' and kept it that way until near the end. She tried to venture back to my right side a couple of times but for the most part she walked nicely beside me, on the left, with a loose leash and didn't cause me any problems. I got a nice of nice pictures of her sweet pretty face and round rottie head.

Olivia immediately surged out front and remained that way for almost all of the two mile walk. That's fine, but she wouldn't just stay straight out in front of me, she wanted to zigzag back and forth from left to right, and she kept that up for most all of the two mile walk as well. I shortened her 6' leash to about 5' to maintain a modicum of control but her leash was always pulled tight. She has a lot more pull than you would expect from a dog her size. She probably traveled 2 or 3 times the distance that Rita and I covered because of all her wandering from side to side. I wasn't sure I'd get any pictures of her except for the back of her head but if I stopped walking she would turn around to look at me, questioning the cause of the hold up. She would have been better on a trail through the woods because the narrow path would keep her more focused on forward motion. But that's just Olivia, she's active, she's all over, she's into everything.

My personal walking style is more rottweiler-like, slow and steady, always moving forward without wasting any energy on wayside distractions. It was a good walk. I'll make it up to Della tomorrow.

We had a brief but intense rainstorm late this afternoon that dumped at least an inch of water on us in about twenty minutes or less. None of it soaked into the already saturated ground. Fog was forming over the fields as the sun was setting.

The only good thing about this rain that no one needed was that it was brief, the sky cleared off again, and we had a pretty sunset.