Pictures With Santa

Well, I've finally fallen off the wagon. I broke my lovely chain of Christmas pictures with the dogs on Sunday. It was a wonderfully lazy day and I just never got around to getting a picture of the dogs. My creative juices have run pretty low and I've only got one other planned shot with the dogs coming up. I do thankfully have the pictures of the dogs with Santa! I picked them up yesterday. Here they are!

I could have posted these pictures yesterday, but I was in a rather foul mood. It all centers around my truck. I took it into the shop to have the weird grinding noise looked at. It turns out that I had a bad wheel bearing and the whole wheel was actually loose. As in, if I had continued to drive on it, there was a chance that the wheel would have just come off. Yeah, not good. The unfortunate part of it all was that they didn't have the part in stock and were going to have to over night it. In the grand scheme of things, this was a very minor problem. They got me that day, figured out what the problem was, and were going to have my truck back to me by the afternoon of the next day. I really can't complain too much. Oh, but I'm going to any way.;o)

The part that sucked so much for me is that I'm taking the majority of this week off from work. I had grand plans of going on long hikes with the dogs every other day. And on the days that we weren't hiking, we were going to be on the mountain. Specifically today was supposed to be a mountain day. That obviously didn't work out. I got the biggest rental car that they had, which was a Rav4. Technically in an emergency I'm sure that I could get both dogs in there. But not ideal. And it was a rental. And it was spotlessly clean. No amount of time with my dogs inside of it was going to leave it in the same condition that I got it in. Therefore, no hiking yesterday and certainly no mountain time today. So I was annoyed that I had two "wasted" vacation days.

The upside though is that I didn't drive my truck until the wheel literally fell off. And I did get two days of being a lazy bum and had a good excuse for it. But I tell ya, taking the dogs for a run last night was unpleasant! Especially since my preferred way of exercising them involves them being off leash so that we can all be happy moving at our preferred speeds. Yes, they were in fine form last night. They both wanted to run like the dickens. Bess was ready to go tearing off after anything that moved, regardless of the fact that she was ripping my arm out of it's socket in the process. Squirrels were in abundance. Heffner was posturing at anything in the distance that could possibly be another dog. And they both had the insane need to hurry up and first catch, then pass anything that was moving ahead of us. Needless to say, I got a heck of a work out!