Marley and Cheryl (and me)

Evan’s roommate was out of the country, and owns a dog. This combination presented a challenge to Evan, but an opportunity for Cheryl. Cheryl – as you probably know – loves animals, and wishes we had a cat/dog, or something fuzzy with four feet. Anyhow, at some point Evan realized that Cheryl would gladly sign up to walk Paddington without much convincing.

Now, Paddington is a labradoodle… Which sounds like a combination of the work of an insane mad scientist, biogenetics, and bad marketing, but, I’m sure there’s a rational explanation for the result. Knowing nothing of labradoodles except that they are dogs, have four legs, and are furry is enough for Cheryl to agree to take care of it for an indeterminate length of time.

To make a long story short, we somehow managed to get the dog to our neck of the woods, where we have a really nice off-leash area.

Here’s Cheryl getting ready to start our journey:

 

The dog park is really just over a block from our place, so we don’t have to walk far. It’s once we got to the park that the shenanigans began…

Now, I’ve never been to a dog park before. Back home every area is an off-leash area, so we didn’t have designated spots for walking pets, but I’m pretty sure dog owners don’t like their dogs being terrorized, which is exactly what began as soon as we took off Paddington’s leash.

As soon as Paddington’s leash was unhooked he ran to the nearest dog, and started ‘terrorizing’ it… That’s the only word I can use to describe it. Now, Paddington is not a mean dog, just a playful dog, but it seems like Paddington’s MO is to annoy a dog until it snaps at him, and then it’s time to move on to another friend or… victim. So here we were, watching Paddington move from dog to dog annoying each to the brink of their sanity before moving to the next. It was methodical, and almost genius in its simplicity and predictability. I’m sure if Newton were watching he would find an F=ma equivalent equation that would dictate his behavior. Now, if we called out “PADDINGTON” you’d expect some form of response… You would be wrong.

So, we now had the attention of every dog owner in the park (and there were many.)

At this point Paddington stole another dog’s ball and ran to the other end of the park. I was happy he was terrorizing a ball, and not another dog. Just as I thought he was preoccupied he ran back from the other end of the park to a group of three dogs peacefully drinking water from a bowl in the middle of the park. Paddington stepped directly into the middle of the bowl, and the three dogs slowly stepped back, in what I can only imagine was disbelief. Paddington proceeded to flip the bowl over, and when satisfied, he ran to the other end of the park… Cheryl re-filled the bowl, in time for Paddington to come back, and flip it back over. At this point he started running towards the big St. Bernard in the middle of the park and began attempting to terrorize it.

This did not work so well, and at this point I openly started calling him Marley.

I’m not even going to go into that, but afterwards he decided to run directly towards the biggest mud pit in the park. He did a superman slide into the mud at top speed, then just laid there. Looking around as all dog owners continued laughing at him. He of course took this as a challenge to somehow find a way to get more muddy, then he rolled… Oh yes. What was mixed in with this mud I will not spend time contemplating, but I’m sure it was not just mud. Regardless, Paddington was rolling in it, and everyone was laughing – until Paddington started terrorizing their dogs in his new mud-monster state… Then somehow it seemed less funny to them.

Here’s a shot of Paddington after his first mud encounter:

 

At some point we managed to get the leash back on Paddington… Then we left the park. I believe this whole thing took about 5 minutes, but we went straight to Lake Washington and made Paddington take a bit of a swim before drying him off.

Here’s Cheryl drying off Paddington back at home:

And from here we somehow managed to get Paddington back to Evan’s house…

Good times :)