Warming Down

...is how I'm interpreting - arguably from the point of view of denial and guilt-reduction - the reluctance of the dogs today to move more than is absolutely necessary.

Matilda is hobbling around a bit, though actually now I think about it she did have an incident yesterday where she stepped on something, and we thought she might have been bitten by an ant or stung by a bee or something.

But whatever, they weren't really into excessively exercise their newly-pink footpads so I decided that the best option was to take a slow stroll down to the brook and do a bit of paddling.

I thought that perhaps the best way to limit speed was to allow Eloise to cycle up there on her little bike.

Stupidly.

Eloise was riding her little bike marvelously up to the point where I opened the front gate to let us out, whereupon she hopped off and pushed the bike up to the top of the road, through Crushers' car park and down to the Brook.

Painfully slow, and yet even at this speed I am having to drag Matilda along. She is clearly interested in just standing still. Or perhaps lying down.

Half and hour later, and Eloise gets on her bike on the path by the brook and goes great guns up to the Montrose Street bridge, whereupon we ditch the bike, let the dogs off, and go for a paddle.

She assisted some boys in building a dam for a while, and we went climbing on the rocks and so on and so forth, but then Matilda found her legs (or her stomach) and went raiding for duck-bread, so I had to go an re-capture her before she actually stole it from someone's hands. Which was quite embarrassing as she had developed a case of acute selective hearing.

Eloise absolutely refused to ride her bike home, so I had to take the dogs and the bike, a combination which isn't good for the back, while she farted around dancing with an umbrella singing "It's starting to rain" which, Jehovah be praised, it didn't until just after we got back.

After a luncheon of cous-cous (which she requested) with apricots, raisins and almonds, she went to bed and for a while I fell asleep next to her.

In the afternoon we went to Cedar Creek, getting there just as the sun dipped its head over the D'Aguilar Mountains. We scrambled around for an hour or so before I remembered that we didn't have any bread.

Eloise found a pocket calculator in my pack and decided that it was a story book that told a story about pigs and wolves, and told me a story whilst we walked about pigs who squealed and laughed and a wolf who growled and laughed. She does a great wolf voice, but her impression of a wolf laughing is indistinguishable from her impression of a pig laughing.