I always love my dog. Really. But, just like when my kids were little, sometimes my patience is thin. Today… thinner than usual, or else Elly was truly annoying. A little of both, I think.

Elizabeth and I took her two well-behaved, obedient Corgis–who always hang around her feet and whom I trip over from time to time–and my two obnoxious disobedient standard poodles to Champoeg State Park. It’s a lovely park, along the banks of the Willamette River, with nice grassy trails. Her Corgis walked nicely with us… and Elly ran wild, fifty feet ahead, fifty feet behind, in the bushes, chasing rabbits, down through the blackberries… always with Dancer a few feet behind. Dancer returned when I asked her, and mostly Elly did, too, before going off on another side trail.

But… we got to the picnic area, where a man was setting up the kind of picnic I always hope someone will invite me to (you know, five coolers, grill, tables with table cloths, that kind of thing), and Elly went crazy. She was tracking something, I have no idea what, and she had zero (0, nada, zilch, none) interest in responding to anything I said, and all kinds of interest in evading me. She does that now and then, and eventually she always comes over and says “oh, excuse me, did you say something?” and acts very sweet and sucks up to me for a treat. Yeah, and usually, someone with nice obedient dogs isn’t watching my humiliation. Twenty minutes of loathing-the-dog later, she finally wandered over to me, bored of tracking whatever-it-was.

So I put her on leash and took her down to the river, and since she was hot, I tossed her in. I believe that would be called revenge. I did fish her back out, and she stopped panting, and her tongue stopped being four feet long.

Unfortunately, cooling her down meant she once again had the energy to pull me along, and I got dragged around for a while until we were back past the picnic area and could let her back off leash. After that, we finished our walk and went to the Heirloom Rose Garden and sniffed roses and admired roses and I bought a lovely old-fashioned rose. We also went to lunch at a new restaurant in Newberg: Recipe. Excellent. And very friendly. We sat outside where we could watch the car, since the dogs were in it.