Saturday, February 2, 2013

My Monthly Diary for January, 2013

Wow, 2013 already.  That means that Mommy started telling people I am 12 1/2 years old.  We don't know when my birthday really was, but it could be anywhere from the end of June to the beginning of August, so at the end of January Mommy puts that 1/2 on.

This was a mostly quiet month until the end.  We had odd weather where it would be really cold (9 degrees) and then a few days later be really warm (64 degrees!) and then drop to really cold (12 degrees) again.  On one of the warm days we went out in 44 degree weather and took a 2.5 mile morning hike and by the time we finished it was five degrees colder and very windy!  The sidewalks were often covered in black ice this month because it would rain one day then freeze the next.  I find very hard to walk on black ice because of the lack of control over my hind end, so we had to take short careful walks.  Because of the weird warm into cold days I had a terrible thing happen one night.  I took Pyramid out with me on a warm morning and left him out to play in the rain.  Then when I went out before bed to get Pyramid so he could come to bed with me he was FROZEN TO THE GROUND!! I couldn't pick him up at all.  I got panicked and barked and barked my "HELP ME!!" bark and Mommy (who says she thought maybe I'd fallen and couldn't get up or there was a coyote in the yard) came running out in her boots and bathrobe to help me.  She wasn't very happy to see what my emergency was, but she did manage to rescue Pyramid so he could come to bed with us.

I celebrated my Gotcha Day on January 19 and then I got a really exciting present from Oztralia a few days later!  And I went on two other hikes when we had warm days which was nice.  Finally at the end of the month Mommy packed our suitcases and we went on a trip.  I thought we were heading up to Wisconsin, but we drove into Minnesota again because this time Mommy's grumpy oldest brother was getting married!  Last time we went there it was for his daughter's wedding.  We stayed at the same hotel because they were so nice to me last time, but this time we were not happy with our neighbors.  They had a toddler who threw a tantrum from 1:00 a.m. until 3:00 a.m. on our first night.  Because the wedding was a morning one Mommy and I had to wake up at 6:30 a.m. and Mommy got very grumpy and loudly said things like "throw it in a tub of ice water" and "maybe you could just strangle it" but they didn't take any of her suggestions.  If I had barked for 5 minutes at 1 a.m. we'd have been told to leave, but not that little brat and his family.  So, Mommy decided to do something she used to do at college when her neighbors were rude and had loud parties until the early morning hours during finals week.  She took the clock radio (which she had already set to a rap station to ensure she woke up on time) and turned the volume to full blast.  Then she set it up so its speakers were pressed against the wall between our rooms and we went back to sleep after the brat stopped howling.  At 6:30 when the radio went off she left it playing full blast through the wall for the half hour it took her to get dressed and feed me and stuff.  Then she turned it off and we went out for our walk.  When we got back we were very happy to see a pair of bleary-eyed adults with two small children in the lobby eating breakfast. I waited in the hotel room (and did not bark) while Mommy went to the wedding and then we went to the park with the tame lake and took a short walk around part of the lake.  I was happy Mommy packed my Oztralia coat because it was only about 15 degrees there and I needed it.  The whole tamed lake was cleared of snow and smoothed down so people could ice skate on it, and they also had little chairs with runners on them so you could push non skaters around, which we thought was very nice.  Neither Mommy nor I brought our cameras this time so we didn't take any pictures, but Mommy fixed one from the summer to give you an idea what it looked like:
The second night at the hotel the brat did not yell, Mommy and I slept well and then we got up and drove home.  We drove through some ice storms which weren't so bad and then when we got to our county we drove into heavy snow which Mommy said wasn't a whole lot of fun to drive in.  Right after we got home it started snowing, raining, sleeting and hailing all at the same time!  This January sure had weird weather.