The Nosh

Cant eat PB&J without milk, right? I love watching them eat peanut butter. I think maybe they might think the same about me.

The Snow

It finally stopped snowing. The storm that had started almost 48 hours earlier dumped 28” of the white powder, what they call Utah Fresh out west. It hadn’t gotten above 22° the whole time. The wind kept up a sustained 25 mph, often gusting to 35-40, creating impressive drifts on the leeward side of everything. Now it was a glorious, crisply cold winter day with not a cloud to be seen. The neighborhood was an alien landscape of perfectly smooth expanses of crystalline white, dotted with lumps and bumps. The smooth parts were the front lawns of the homes on the street. They started at the doorstep of one house and stretched unbroken to the doorstep of the house on the other side of the street. Wait minute, street? What street? Those lumps and bumps were the tell tale signs of hidden cars. All in all, the work of a typical winter Nor’easter.

Java loves the snow. He’ll go into romp mode the minute he steps out of the house. There is a school thats a 2 minute drive from home, we often go up there because it has a huge playing field. Though it is bordered on 2 sides with woods that I need to watch and make sure he doesn’t disappear into, there is a lot of room to maraud and throw the ball or the kong. On the third side is the parking lot. When there is fresh snow, he can’t wait to get out of the car and play in it. When I toss the kong, he is on the job and goes charging after it. If the snow is deep enough, he “porpoises” as he runs-jumping out of the snow with each stride, going airborne and then landing 5 or 6 feet away and then taking off again. When he gets to the hole in the untracked snow where the kong disappeared, he does his best polar bear imitation and half stands up on hind legs and pounces on the hole. When he comes down, he buries his head in the snow right up to his shoulders, farther if it is deep enough. He loves it and I love watching.

The 4th side of the field drops off at about 40° to the running track below it. The vertical drop is easily 5’, more to one side. The wind had been blowing perpendicular to the drop for most of the storm. Now that steep slope was just a subtle grade of maybe 10°. That drift was pretty deep. I knew where it dropped off, but Java didn’t. I stood at the edge and tossed the kong down, what used to be, the hill. He’s already has a running start and launches himself off terra firma, expecting to ‘land’ on what appears to be the ‘ground’. WHUMP! He disappears as he hits the surface and just keeps going! Just like Wile E. Coyote hitting the pavement when another one of his intricate contraptions from the Acme Corporation fails him again. I couldn’t stop laughing! It has to have been one of the singularly most riotous things I have ever seen. He reappears as an albino, in posession of the kong, and has to drop into 4 paw low to fight his way back up the hill. He would try to do his porpoise move but that wasn’t happening. Each time he tried the upstroke, the weight of the snow would stop him short and his front end would drop back into it and he would come back up with a fresh pile on his head and repeat. At this point, I couldn’t tell which one of us was having more fun. He’s laughing, Im barking and when he gets to the top, we do it all over again. Neither of us could get enough. That was a good day.

The Sentries