dpeeps – Page 3 – gray blank page

i have a bodyguard

today, i took luna to the dog park for the first time in a while. when we got there, there wasn’t many dogs there but after about 45 minutes some dogs finally showed up. a couple of them were poodles and the white one has a problem with jumping and an owner that seemed aloof about it. luna was standing near me and that white poodle walked over and jumped at me and i pushed it down and said “no”. a few minutes later the same scenario happened except i was not the one to give the “no” command. luna was. luna immediately growled and snarled and lunged at that white poodle. from that point on if dogs came next to me, luna was on duty. if you’re another dog standing next to me, beware of dog. there’s a couple of pics below. beyond that, luna is about 5 years old now and she’s begun tipping the scale. i changed her food not long ago and will be changing it again. they also want her to have large breed formula to help support her joints more. other than that, pretty healthy for a dog that’s had a heart murmur her whole life so far, and survived the cocktail of viruses. for the first time ever i was told she probably ate rocks before which is why her teeth are ground/broken. i guess that’s why she looked like she’d been fed when i adopted her!

today i became a dog walker

a couple of weeks ago i started volunteering at animal defense league, which is the shelter where luna was adopted from. i’ve done a couple of shifts cleaning kennels, washing bowl, washing/filling kong toys. those couple of shifts are a prerequisite to being able to walk dogs. today i was able to get training to be a dog walker. obviously they didn’t train me on “walking dogs” but it was training on how they want me to enter kennels and how to read the dog boards that tell which dogs are easy/ask a staffer/don’t walk status. after i was trained they found a dog for me to walk. they picked dancer. on dancer’s card it said “leash is dumb”. and that’s about how she acted for 30 minutes. she walked ok maybe for about 10 minutes of that. most of the rest of the time was me coaxing her or me trying to pull her to get her to move. fun times. the reason i wanted to be dog walker status is that they don’t usually have any volunteer shifts after i get off work during the week. being a dog walker allows me to be able to just walk in and walk dogs (when they’re open). then i can work a shift or whatever on the weekends as i can, or walk dogs too, whatever. plus sometimes they do events that need dog walkers. anyways, here’s dancer!

Road Trip – 11/18/2023 – Starship Test Flight 2

Well, Luna and I got picked up at about 10pm Friday night and chauffeured down to South Padre Island, TX so we could see the 2nd test flight for Spacex’s starship. We got down there at about 3am and were already in a long line of traffic waiting for the park to open their gates. By the time they started letting everyone in about an hour later the traffic was already backed up onto the causeway and that was around 4am or so. I took a few pictures and a video for everyone’s enjoyment! Thanks Mark & Susan!

Hike – 3/25/2023 – Hill Country State Natural Area

Luna and I headed out to Hill Country State Natural Area. It’s about 10 miles outside Bandera. If you hit HAAAYYY HOLLARRRR Rd you’re almost there! It’s a pretty large area. The lady said there’s 40 miles worth of trails and over the course of 4 hours Luna and I saw 11 of those miles. For the first time ever Luna didn’t want to play fetch when we got home. Thankfully I had just enough water for us both. It wasn’t really the route I expected to take out there on the trails. I’d been wanting to go out there and I saw they had Madrone trees which sounded pretty cool. I was able to find a few (barely) and definitely found some amazing views and if I hadn’t after climbing 58 floors I’d be sad.

Hike – 3/4/2023 – Mission Del Lago Trailhead

This morning Luna and I got out early and hit the trail around 7:45 am to avoid the heat. Not much going on here. We hiked from the Mission Del Lago Trailhead to the Pleasonton Trailhead and back. It was between a 7-8 mile hike and took us around 3 hours. Luna is usually in the gentle lead on walks now. She is persistent with needing to be in the lead but does pretty well with this on. This trail goes along Mitchell Lake, aka Lake Stinky, aka Stay Away From Mitchell Lake. We did get to see a horse’s ass though! The horses were funny. I wish I could have videoed it. When we walked back past them they were right on the fence line along the trail. Luna kept wanting to dart at them and would just end up pulled back to me. I guess one of the horses then thought it would be fun to tease Luna and persisted to walk along the fence line following us for about 100 yards, maybe a little more.