Dog Days of Summer

My favorite time of the day is about 8pm on a summer night.  The day is over, but the night feels so young when it's still light out.  When we walk the neighborhood there are so many people out and about with their dogs and even though my dogs have very questionable social skills and we sometimes have to cross the street to avoid an ugly growling incident or an awkwardly long sniffing of the privates, I love to see people walking their pups.

Or not walking them, as the case may be.  The family who lives behind us (our backyards back up to the same alley) is a Chinese family who moved here to put their kids through school in America.  They have four kids who all went to medical school.  Their youngest daughter moved back home to go to school and brought her husband and their doberman with her.  The parents have a yappy little rat terrier of some kind and he and the doberman make a hilarious duo, with the terrier running circles around the doberman's long legs.  Also the doberman wears booties (much more successfully than Cooper did).

We got home last night from this new Mexican restaurant in our neighborhood that we hoped to make "our" Mexican restaurant but this was the second time we'd eaten there and unfortunately we just don't like it.  The rice is yuck and the enchilada sauce is just no good.  There's another Mexican place we like much better except they don't have outdoor seating and it's "family-owned" in the sense that an eight-year old bussed our table and filled our water glasses last time we were there which sort of made me uncomfortable.  So we are still trying to find our favorite.

Anyway.

We got home from the not-favorite Mexican restaurant and saw the son-in-law on his bicycle in the alley.  They had a cart thing hooked up to the back of the bike for kids to ride in--not one of those enclosed pup tents, but an open-air, double-seater cart.  Instead of a kid, the yappy little terrier was perched on one of the seats, harnessed in, with a big doggy grin on his face.  The doberman (not wearing booties at the time) was patiently waiting along side the bike.  The son-in-law explained that the terrier can't keep up with the doberman on their nightly bike ride/run so they bought the carrier so that the little dog can come too.  Adorable.

I asked him if he would offer rides to other dogs in the neighborhood and he said that we can borrow the cart for our dogs if we want to.  Now we just need new bikes!

Tonight we were walking the pups around the block and saw two ladies walking, one of them pushing a stroller.  They commented on how cute my dogs were and I was saying the same thing about their baby when I realized that they had a shih tzu in the basket underneath the stroller!  He was totally chilled out, just hanging in the basket. 

I think Cooper and Mac might have been a little jealous of these sweet rides.


So far we have no plans to give our pups the lazy way out on our walks, but as Little Mac gets older, I'm thinking that maybe we could find a little cart that we could harness to Cooper and he could pull his sister around the neighborhood!  How cute would that be?

No, it's a great idea.