Staying in the moment, unless the moment is the kind that comes before a moment where something better might happen.

Walking around the neighborhood on leashes for short amounts of time, as part of the rehab that crappy leg of Otterpop plan, not our cup of tea. Not our large size tumbler of hearty tequila beverage. I never drink tea. Or kombucha. You know about kombucha? A healthy drink that tastes like moldy pieces of poisonous tree bark and supposed to cure every single ill and make you beautiful and skinny and wrinkle free and at the expensive natural grocery store there are whole aisles devoted to kombucha and I tried it and it almost made me barf and never, ever will I try it again. Just sucks.

My vet had the recommendation that perhaps Otterpop would enjoy seeing the sights on our daily walks by stroller. Like I would put Otterpop into a baby stroller, maybe even the bright orange cordura ones with juicy 4WD tires, and travel to forest trails or along the beach path like that. Like a lady who pushes her dog around in a stroller. A jogging stroller. A bright orange jogging stroller with a dog sitting in the baby seat. A dog like Otterpop. Who I guess at this point would probably be wearing a little costume, maybe a bear hat and a light green dress with a tail hole in the ass. Why not. Because at that point, I would probably be wearing a little costume too, like a light green dress with a hole in the ass and a bear hat with a long flowing racoon tail and heavy, cloven platform boots with pantyhose pulled over the tops of them, and in that costume I would be pushing the bright orange baby stroller full of Otterpop along the forest trail and likely at this point I'd be screaming the lyrics to Pink Floyd's The Wall out in time with the clippity clop of my cloven hoofed platform boots.

Now we all have something to look forward to.

So since that plan not working out quite yet, we endure the little short walks and no running around at the beach and I yell at the dogs' ill advised plans to race around the house instead and launch themselves off of tall furniture at each other in single bounds. My plan is if one of us has to suffer, then we all have to suffer. So Otterpop can't run, none of us are going to run. We are all just going to walk and on leashes and we're going to like it, dammit. Or actually we're not going to like it, we're going to somewhat stomp around the neighborhood and perhaps do it with a scowl, a big ugly, wrinkle enducing, squinty eyed scowl on our faces.

OK. The dogs actually, perhaps not scowling. They're pretty happy to just be out and traipsing along, they think we're heading down to the beach and they're pulling me along so I forget to stomp scowl. The ruckus they throw, just for the chance to be the first one to have that boring old leash snapped onto their collar. Make it into a funny game and it's the quietest, stillest one that gets that leash first. Sister Mary Ruby. Gustavo is spinning in little circles to the right and Otterpop is barking her head off and finally they clue in about the quiet, laying down thing. And they lay down as quietly as they can which is quivery and even their eyeballs shake.

The days got short all of a sudden, so when I get home from work it's pretty much dark and when we're walking, the lights are on in the houses and people are inside, feeding their kids and watching giant tv's the size of my couch with shows about giant cakes. People don't think that it's dark yet because even just yesterday this time, it wasn't. They don't know I'm out there watching in their windows and they should pull closed those curtains now, because winter's set in.The dogs stop to pee on a tree and I watch the giant cake show on the giant tv through a giant plate glass window for a minute. The fog is rolling in, big damp wafting wads of it, and I have 2 jackets on, and when all 3 dogs have their fill of tree peeing, I tear myself away from peeping tom cake watching. It was a million layers and about 4 feet tall and covered with ugly little stars and squiggly lines of cake frosting. A cake of such grandeur that it's on the biggest tv in the world. Not sure who would even want that cake, but there it is. Back we go to traipsing along and that's just what we do for now.