Park Dogs 2011

Muri and I are headed for Arizona on Friday, meaning we’ll get in very late.  We have Maddux’s football game and Reed’s baseball game on Saturday morning and we’re going out to celebrate my son-in-law’s birthday Saturday night.  The idea-hopper has been running low anyway, so today, you get – tada! – a rerun.  Hey, if NBC can do it, so can Older Eyes.  Back in August of 2009, I posted a two-part (true) story about a confrontation between My Inner Curmudgeon and a Dog Nazi.  I’m reposting it today as one post.  It’s long but it shows my Inner Curmudgeon at his finest.

My favorite writing-painting-justsitting park is also a haven for local dog owners. The dogs come in every size, shape, and breed from anorexic chihuahuas to overfed Labs and Newfoundlands that look like well-groomed bears, often hilariously matched to their owners or hilariously mismatched. If you’ve noticed my gravatar, you can probably guess that I’m a cat person … though I’ve never met a cat I didn’t like, I take dogs on a case-by-case basis. As an observer of life, though, I enjoy watching the interactions of owners with their dogs, the obvious affection that exists between them and the peculiarities that an intimate relationship with a dog seems to bring out in humans (above and beyond talking to them like they actually understand, which cat owners do, too).

Walking Dogs, Old Men and Angry Women

If you were to look through  my  posts for the last year and a half … and then take a peek at my avatar … you’d probably say that I post about dogs an awful lot for a cat-lover.   The explanation, of course, is the amount of time I spend in Yorba Linda Regional Park, perhaps the dog-walking capital of North Orange County.   Maybe if people walked their cats … but then they wouldn’t be cats, would they?   At any rate, as a cat person, I find dog-walking behavior interesting.