New Year's Walk

Sailor here.

Happy New Year, though this makes no sense to me; it's a new day today, as always, but you can't wake up and have a whole year gone poof in one light/dark cycle. We should be saying Happy New Day.

Mom says the New Year has to do with counting and that we are in a new millennium now because the monkey who started the new roaming calendar by counting for the poop started counting before the number zero was invented.

Now, please. Monkeys can't count and what does poop have to do with it, and calendars can't roam, and zero isn't a number because it isn't anything, it's nothing. But I am a polite gentlecollie and don’t want to argue with Mom, so I won't bring any of this up. I'll tell Zoe and let her bring it up.

As I said, I’m a gentlecollie. And I'm polite, that is, until joggers run at us on the street. Then I just have to woof them out of the way. They are threatening us, I just know it, because they run directly at us, not in a curve, they hold their heads high and sometimes their ears are big and black and forward, and they look directly at us. Mom says that they are not threatening us in dog language, they are exercising with radios attached to their ears and they look ahead so they won't step in a hole or dog poop or anything. Well, I disagree, but I have trained Mom to treat me when they appear and, if the truth be known, I don't feel aggressive when my tummy is looking forward to freeze-dried liver. Now when I see a jogger, I turn to Mom and wag and smile and drool. Mom says this is a great answer to the woofing thing.

We did a lot of jogger training this morning on our walk. Mom says the New Year always brings them out. That was fine with me, it meant lots of treats. And then, as we were coming around a corner, lo and behold, there was a Stinky Dead Thing in the middle of the path. Zoe told me that if I ever came across a Stinky Dead Thing to roll in it, but just as I started to sniff to see if it was stinky enough, Mom decided out of the blue to practice the LeaveIt command. So I had to leave it. She told me what a good dog I was and treated me. Then we walked back toward the Stinky Dead Thing again and I had to LeaveIt again. She did several more LeaveIt’s and gave me a Cheerio each time. She was very pleased with me because a little while later when we came across another Stinky Dead Thing, I left it without being told. That got me liver! I think I will wait for Zoe to roll in it instead.

On our morning walk, Mom found a lot of shiny stuff on the road. She says it’s called confetti and that revelers from last night probably tossed it out the window of their cars. She picked some of it up. The confetti was gold and shaped like angels with a few green Christmas trees and red candy canes. She seemed quite pleased with her find, and scattered it on the dining room tablecloth when we got home. It looked nice, but gold angels really can't compete with Stinky Dead Things.