Psycho Puppy, qu'est ce que c'est?

Even as I type this, my son is becoming increasingly late for school - the shoe bandit has struck again. The shoe bandit takes socks and shoes and bits of trash and shirts and stuffed animals and hair clips and (damn him) contact lens cases out to the yard where he distributes them in a seemingly random pattern that is apparently pleasing to the canine eye. He rarely chews them up - just moves them out. That's funny and cute and adorable; it's so funny and cute and adorable that you just want to send him out to play in traffic. On days like today, when it's inexplicably, global warmingly 65 degrees and pouring rain, it's even worse. But that's cool, since global warming is just another part of my Extreme Dog Walking experiences.

Django has gotten to the age where he's kind of like a human five year old - full of enthusiasm and energy and charm, but no sense at all. He bounces around on the end of the leash like one of those rubber balls attached to a wooden paddle: a toy wielded by a completely spastic toddler. This morning, in the warm rain, he discovered the joy that is puddles. "Rivers!" he thought (occasionally, I can hear the dogs think. Shut UP. I can TOO.) "There are rivers all over the road today! Yay, rivers!" and he bounded in. To. Every. Single. Puddle. There were a lot of puddles. He became a very, very wet puppy. He likes to jump up on me. I became a very, very wet extreme dog walker, while Theo, who has his own agenda, mostly focused on his arch-enemy, the chained up chow behind the stockade fence, just got bigger and bigger and bigger: rain affects Theo's collie pelt like a blow dryer affects a certain kind of Southern lady.

Yesterday, we were just in time to see a couple of school buses unload. Theo has never liked school buses: they're too big, too noisy, too, well, YELLOW. (What he really hates and fears, though, are UPS trucks. Go figure.) However, Theo is extremely fond of children, although he has a tendency to try to herd them. Django knows very little about children, has hardly ever met any, and knows nothing about school buses. The bus doors opened, the kids filed noisily out and Django watched in horror as the huge yellow things began to spit out midgets. He did a complete back flip at the end of the leash, ran between my legs and tried to get the hell away as fast as he possibly could. It was hilarious. Sad, but hilarious. Meanwhile, Theo, desperate for love, stood there wagging his tail so hard his whole fat self shook.