New Website, and More about Bonnie

Doug noticed that my website hasn't been updated in a long time, that, for example, the bibliography ends in 2005 (!!!) and a lot of links are broken.  He's working on making me a shiny new website with more modern features, and while he was doing that he mentioned that I should probably come up with some new content to go with it.  I noticed that although I have a page devoted to Spark, our last dog, I never wrote one about Bonnie, the dog we got six years ago.  So here it is -- it should go up on the website as soon as it's ready:

Hi.  My name is Bonnie-Get-Down!, but most people just call me Bonnie.  I’m a very handsome black Lab, mixed in with some other good-looking breeds like German Shepherd.  I’ve lived in a lot of places before I came here, more than I have paws to count them.  For a while I lived with my brother, whose name is Clyde-Stop-That!, though most people called him Clyde.  Then one day some people took Clyde away, and a while after that some other people came and took me away too.

I’d never had a pack before, except for Clyde, so it took me a long time to understand that I was going to stay with those people forever.  Fortunately, I like it here a lot.  For one thing, the food is very good, though I feel the portions could be bigger.  And then there are the walks -- if you can believe it, I’d never been on a walk before.  I thought the first one was fun, but I had no idea we’d do this twice a day.  Now I can’t wait to go -- sometimes I even have to poke and herd Mom and Dad to get them moving.  (I get my excellent herding abilities from my Shepherd side.)

So I love my pack -- of course I do -- but sometimes, I have to say, they can act pretty strange.

Here’s an example.  I spend a lot of time sitting on my couch and looking out the window, making sure the house is protected from mail carriers and evil cats.  One day I saw an evil cat outside and, as usual, I started barking loudly and hitting the window with my nose.  Then something very strange happened -- the window sort of broke outward and opened up, and there was a hole for me to jump through and get at that cat once and for all.  The hole was still too small for me, though, so I kept barking and poking at it to make it bigger.

Then Mom and Dad came running into the room, and they yelled at me and pulled me away from the window.  They put a piece of cardboard over the window so I couldn’t see out of it, and a few days later someone came and put some new glass in.

I just don’t get it.  You’d think Mom and Dad would be glad to know that you can open the window this way, and that I can finally get rid of that cat.  Instead they yelled at me like I’d done something wrong.  And the new window is thicker than the old one, so I can’t make it open in the same way.

Or there’s this.  Me and Mom sometimes go to this terrific park, the best place in the world.  I can run off-leash, and there’s a part of the bay I can swim in, and there are tennis balls lying around that I can pick up and get Mom to throw.  Sometimes Mom takes the ball away from me and gives it to another dog, which seems unfair -- after all, I was the one that caught it last.

And there are gophers, and you can sit by the holes and wait quietly for them to come up and see if you can catch one.  I don’t think Mom understands this game, because she usually makes a lot of noise coming up to the hole, and of course the gopher hears her and goes and hides.  It’s very frustrating -- sometimes she does this just as I’m about to make my move.

Anyway, we went to the park and had a terrific day, and then we went back to the parking lot.  Just as we were about to get into the car, though, I saw that there was another park, past the entrance to the lot, and I ran out to explore it.

The first thing I noticed was that there were a lot of new games in this park.  For example, you could run back and forth across the street, dodging the cars, and sometimes you could even get the car to make a loud noise, like a goose honking.

But Mom, for some reason, started running after me and yelling for me to come back.  I didn’t understand why -- after all, she likes the old park, so she should have liked this one too.  And she usually likes playing Chase Me, which is one of my favorite games in the world.  I darted into another parking lot, a much bigger one, and I saw how we could play a new and terrific version of Chase Me: I would run through the rows of cars and then duck between them and go past two or three rows, and she would have to guess which row I’d come out at.

But she kept calling at me to come back, and she sounded angrier and angrier.  By this time I was so excited about all the new smells and sights that I sort of stopped paying attention to her, and I went back to dodging the cars for a while.

Finally I felt thirsty, and I ran back to the water fountain at the first park.  When I stopped to take a drink of water she grabbed me by the collar and shouted very close to me, louder and louder, more angry than I’d ever heard her.  We went back to the car and dried me off with a towel the way we usually do, but this time she seemed very clumsy and kept pulling at me roughly.  And then when we drove home she didn’t talk to me at all.

Now that I think of it, we haven’t gone back there in a long time.  It’s too bad, because I never did get to explore the rest of that new park.