Officially the cutest dog in the world

According to my friend Kelly, Sophia, by evidence of this photo taken at Mud Bay Granary at University Village on Sunday, is the CUTEST DOG IN THE WORLD. I have to agree with her.


The weather this past weekend was awesome. On Saturday Steve spent the day at Pacific Raceways for another BMW driving event (one of those 6 AM to 6 PM sort of days). Sophia and I had a leisurely morning, and then I left for my volunteer shift at the Seattle Animal Shelter.

I am becoming known as the laundry queen at the shelter. All of the volunteers there just want to work with the animals and don't appreciate that taking care of all those kitty towels and doggy blankets is also a way of helping them. So I wander back and forth between doing laundry (kinda stinky, but very rewarding) and doing my MatchMaker work. This shift I answered a lot of questions from people wanting to be a foster home. This is great, since foster homes are so valuable and directly instrumental to saving the lives of dogs and cats coming thru the shelter program. Every home opened to foster a cat or dog frees up a cage or kennel at the shelter for a new arrival coming in off the street. If there was no room, the euthanasia rate would be a lot higher. SAS takes pride in its high adoption rate and model volunteer program.

Sunday we woke up to the power going out at 9 AM. All of the cordless phones beeped when they lost power at their bases, and the fridge shut off. It's really quiet when nothing humming anywhere. It was time to get up anyway, so Steve built a fire and got out the one-burner camp stove from the teardrop. He boiled a big pot of water for hot chocolate and then we scrambled some eggs and split a grapefruit. Since it was too dark to do anything downstairs (cleaning was on the agenda) we sat around the fire and read. Then he did some touch up painting in the bedroom.

The power came on about 1 PM, but by that time we were planning on heading across town to Magnuson - Sophia for a visit to the small dog play park, and Steve to "Kite Hill", above Lake Washington. We also packed the skates and blades but ultimately didn't use them.

So Steve dropped us off at the dog park and went to find Kite Hill. Sophia is doing real well, pretty much a normal dog now. She runs around a bit chasing some of the other dogs. She still doesn't really "engage", in wrestling or biting or tackling, but she sort of plays referee. When two other dogs are chasing each other around and making a lot of noise she runs up to them and barks and watches, then scoots off again before she gets sucked in to the rambunctiousness (yes that's a word - because I said so.)

Steve showed up not too much later - there really wasn't enough wind for his stunt kite (unlike the previous weekend out on Alki - where there was so much wind my eyes streamed tears and I froze my butt off - and Sophia tried to hide from the wind). After she seemed to get bored, we walked with her off leash out of the small dog play area into the big dog park - the first time she has been off leash around big dogs (other than meeting my friend Colette's dogs the previous week). A couple of times she took off ahead of us, but most of the time she fell into step between us, at a heel, as if she was on the leash, part of the "pack". She got worried after Steve left to try the wind again, and then she didn't have any fun because she was trying to find him. So we finally left and walked up the trail and out onto Kite Hill. There's quite a view from there!

By this time it is after 5 PM. So we start heading back, making a stop at University Village to use our freebie coupons at Jamba Juice. We also went to Mud Bay Granary, a small natural food pet store, and had the feather try-on incident.

We got home about 7 PM, and it was dark. We didn't get anything done around the house, but had a great time!