The Great Northern Adventure

Greetings all. Weeks have passed and snow has melted. Clouds have hung around. Sometimes big heavy ones that sit right on camp and make it hard to see. Sometimes high flat ones, obscuring the sun. All sorts of clouds. With these clouds often comes WXCL days and on those days we spend a lot of time napping, playing Scrabble with the cook. Sometimes we kick on the generator and all gather in and watch a movie. Karen tries to have extra delicious snacks to comfort us through the dull days like that. One particular movie session, Karen made us Popcorn made on the stove and peppered with parmesan cheese. It was sumptuous.

Along with these weather days we get to enjoy the particularly pungent odeur of wet dog. I hug them to put on their harnesses, many of them like to jump up and greet you with a hug, others just double high-five your chest. Each dog has its own, personal greeting for me. They also vary throughout the day. Some of my dogs are morning people. Some are afternooners. We have a couple young girl dogs, just about a year old. Little (maybe 40-45 lbs) white, short hair girls with tails that curl up over their backs. If they get put together on a team it is a wreck b/c they jump all over each other and tangle the line. Some of my dogs will unabashedly go bell-up in front of other dogs. Some dogs won't back down. Usually the young males... funnily enough.

It is always interesting in the mornings when the dogs haven't seen you since the night before, and you certainly have so many new smells on the seat of your pants. And so the dogs greet you, just like they greet each other. And nothing wakes you up at 6 in the morning quite like that. And the dogs seem so unabashed about the whole ordeal and that is when I started thinking about that very obvious difference between humans and animals...we are the only ones that blush. Chew on that.