Hooper is a licker.

In recent days, the temperatures have soared to the point where I wore shorts to work today. Never mind that it is supposed to snow here tomorrow, in April you take advantage of the warm sunny days. So I wore shorts today, and that means Hooper was licking my legs (and up my shorts) whenever I was in the vicinity. With our dear friends Dierdre and Evan coming this weekend with their three kids in tow, I started thinking it might might be a good time to teach Hooper that the vigorous licking, while appreciated, is not always appropriate.

And so we have embarked on our latest “trick”, the training of “stop licking”. Brenda & I decided it would be cool to teach Hooper some Italian while we were at it, so we selected the term “basta” as the “leave me alone” term, which is Italian for “enough”. He’s getting it.

How cool is it to have a bilingual Lab?

This is cool. What we got here is the last remnants of the 8” of snow that dumped on Boulder yesterday. The Colorado sun came out in force today, melting most of the white stuff; the final traces are hanging tough here in the shadow cast by the ballfield fence, all nice and neat in a line, while Hooper and Lulu watch in despair as Jeannie and the other woman walk away with their dogs Joplin and Kyla:

Just goes to show you what a little shading can do in terms of reducing the amount of direct beam solar radiation that affects a given area.

P.S.
The bits of snow missing in the foreground were eaten by Hooper. No shading device could have prevented that.

Today is Hooper’s birthday, making Hooper one year old! In truth, we brought him home at six months of age, and he was picked up as a stray in Utah sometime before that, so unfortunately we really don’t know the exact circumstances or conditions of his conception, birth and early development. The vet guessed he was six months old, based on his teeth, when we took him in or his first checkup in early August. So we counted back from there and picked Groundhog Day as his “birthday”. In truth we’ll never know, and we don’t care. Just as we’ll never really know his genetic makeup. He’s Hooper the Dog, he’s ours, he’s one today, and we love him. So we took him out for a hike.

Up past Jamestown there’s a trail that meanders through the tall trees and it seemed as good as any for a winter hike. Hooper seems to love the hiking, the snow, the altitude, the adventure, as much as all of us. Once out of the car, he starts whimpering if we don’t get on with the business of plodding through the snow in a timely fashion. He’s generally uninterested in drinking water because that would involve stopping. Instead, he snags chunks of snow and ice on the fly, and keeps on marching.

Today’s hike led to a vague trail hidden by snow, and Brenda eventually became more interested in scaling a boulder for the view at the top than continuing to the summit. Hooper & I ventured onward, but he kept looking back at Brenda and I lost all sight of anything recognizable as a trail, so we headed back to join her. We snapped a few pics, headed back to town and picked up new treats and toys for the birthday boy. He’s cached out on his bed now, amidst the debris of yet another destroyed stuffed toy. Life is good.

Hooper is a soccer wunderkind. Like all of his other traits/habits/skills, we discovered this over time.

It started with a yellow “utility ball” we found in the snow in November, a forgotten castaway from an Aurora 7 Elementary School recess. Upon discovering the lost ball languishing on top of the fresh snow at the schoolyard after one of the first snowfalls of the season here in Boulder, I kicked it toward the ballfield and Hooper immediately recognized the potential. We ran toward the ballfield gate, kicking the ball along, and once we got inside, a game of keep-away/get-the-ball-past-the-dog ensued, for far longer than it should have.

Since that time, a number of balls (soccer balls, utility balls, baseballs… balls!) have turned up in the ballfields where we take our dogs—in various states of disrepair and deflation—and recently a particular soccer ball has become the apple in Hooper’s eye.

I left work early today to make a doctor’s appointment, so Hooper & I ended up at the ballfield earlier than usual. With no other dog action going on, we resorted to a good old fashioned game of one-on-one fetch. But returning from the second throw of the day, Hooper discovered a pathetic, half-deflated, chewed-up soccer ball to his left and dropped the baseball he was bringing back to me and darted off towards the soccer ball. He jumped on it, bit it, and bounced back a foot or so and nosed at the ball, then looked at me, tail wagging.

Game on.

Soccer with Hooper is simple; make the ball go. But there are evolutionary, hard-wired layers to the game that I find interesting. Hooper’s Border Collie DNA makes this a game of Get in Front of the Ball, Herd the Ball, more than anything else. All it takes to put Hooper in motion is to simply put your body between ball and dog; he circles around and positions himself in front of the ball and you with precision. You can keep moving around the ball and he will follow suit, making sure that ball has no “out”.

The main game is to put the ball in motion though, and this clearly makes Hooper’s day. cutting left and right, Hooper eyes the ball, my feet, my hips and my eyes, as if the end result of my getting past him with the ball decides the World Cup Championship Match. And so I oblige, until I am out of breath. We cut left and right, kick-dribbling and running, Hooper’s tongue hanging out, his big brown eyes tracking my every move. The best part is when we get a certain momentum going in one direction and I open up enough distance between ourselves that I can give the ball a good whack, sending the ball arcing just over Hooper’s head in a dead run; Hooper springs up into the air, all four paws off the ground, and he throws a single snap of the teeth towards the ball, missing, and then scampers off to tackle the errant ball. He pounces, shakes it a few times like it owes him money, drops it, backs up a few steps, and looks at me and wags his tail. How does one resist this plea?

We played this game for a full hour in the ballpark tonight, with no other dogs joining us. I even gave up early and sat on the dugout bench, holding the leash. Hooper came up to me and dropped the ball at my feet, which I rewarded with another ten minutes of World Cup Doggie Soccer. Afterward, we walked home and I made him another batch of homemade dog treats; I think I love this animal.

Well, it’s official. I am fucking crazy.

At the ballfield tonight, exercising the dog, my neighbor Jeannie whipped out some treats for Hooper and her dog Joplin. She mentioned they were homemade. Instead of saying “take your homemade, organic, fair trade dog treats and your sixties-icon-named-after dog and get the hell out of here, hippie”, I said “oh really? That sounds like a good idea, all-natural and all”. Still not totally convinced this was anything I wanted to get involved in, I went home and did as she instructed, and Googled “homemade dog treats”. After perusing a few that seemed like more trouble than they were worth, I stumbled across these little babies, called Bacon Bites.

In other words, bacon cookies. Imagine my delight!

And so I convinced Brenda when she got home that BLTs were on the menu tonight, and the extra bacon could go into the treats (OK, OK, there’s never extra bacon when I make BLTs, but I thought this was a way to divert some of the fat to another stomach). And so, this guy who doesn’t bake, who doesn’t really like cookies at all, poured bacon fat and crumbled crispy bacon into a bowl with flour and egg (and garlic powder!) and actually rolled it out and cut it into little cookie nips. They are baking right now, at three twenty five, for thirty five to forty minutes. I am baking cookies for my dog. I am fucking insane. What’s sadder is that I fully plan to sample the cookies, and I’m not a little scared that I will actually like them and start fighting with Hooper over them. I mean, they’re bacon cookies, after all. Bacon… COOKIES! Am I wrong!?

Just before I started rolling out the dough, I walked over to Hooper with the dough (who was nicely draped over his bed, by the way) and let him have a sniff; two whiffs and he opened wide and tried to take the whole glob. So, I think he’s gonna like ‘em.

Life goes on around here, the main story being the cat and dog, who continue to work through their issues. The gate remains, but Ellie is definitely interested in coming down and joining us. If only that damned dog wasn’t down here:

When one of us does take Hooper out for a walk, Ellie is quick to come down, hurdle the gate, and start exploring the lower levels. Of course, she likes to do this from up high, like on top of the kitchen cabinets:

Hooper finally got his own bed, but currently he believes it to be a giant expensive chew toy. Deep down, he knows what he’s supposed to do on it, and eventually he settles down and demonstrates, like so:

This post also is the first one that employs a new plugin that I installed, which allows for a slick Javascript display that enlarges the images in my posts. Try it out; click on any image in the post and it will expand to a slightly larger size, with caption. I plan to refine this a little bit more and then I’ll incorporate this effect into all the previous posts, since I need to update them all to work with my new theme. Feedback welcome!

Now that my wife and I own a dog, we have the pleasure of walking him, and picking up his deuces. One day recently I was out walking Hooper on his pee track (the short circuit around the public walkways in front of my condo) and he dropped a deuce on me, unsuspectingly. I had no poop bag. lesson learned. But I can tell you this, I went back in the house, got a bag and hunted Hooper’s package down like the minefield clearers of Bosnia. Because I really have always hated people who leave their dog’s crap in ball fields and on lawns. I don’t want to be that guy. And so you can imagine my disgust last night when, as I roamed the ballfield alone, Hooper having long since given up on any and all formal training for the evening and scampering around at the other end of the park, I came across a pile. Now, this ballfield had a bunch of kids playing baseball in it just yesterday, it’s not like no one’s ever in here. I think it’s pretty damned lame to leave your dog’s crap in a public park, and I worry that one day Hooper’s gonna drop one on a neighbor’s lawn and I’m gonna get yelled at because of the assumption that I’d just leave it there. This fear is neatly summarized in a very entertaining tale at Rachel Lucas’ website, which my friend from work told me about. Thought I’d share. The gal’s got spunk.

Read: To Poop or not to Poop

Any doubts about Hooper’s hiking abilities, including high altitude, cold/snow, distance, have been put to rest. Hooper is a wonder dog.

With the holiday weekend winding down, and with the entire Front Range experiencing a very late start to the snow season, I decided to go up to Brainard Lake and scope out the trail to Mount Audubon, a hike that Brenda & I successfully did last summer. Mount Audubon stands over 13,000’ tall, so generally by this time of the year it’s totally covered with snow and is a challenge to summit. But with the dearth of snow we’ve had so far this year, I thought it might be a doable climb, and a great intro for Hooper to a longer and higher hike. Brenda’s been a bit under the weather, so she stayed home but Hooper & I headed out around 8:30 this morning to see what kind of trouble we could get into.

The access road to Brainard Lake is closed this time of year, which adds another two miles of walking just to get to the trailhead; I totally underestimated the impact of this, especially in winter with all the snow. Forty minutes after we left the car, we finally arrived at the Marshall Lake trailhead (I was totally going from memory of our hike last year, and I have to say I was pretty happy that I was able to find my way back!). At this point, I had already pulled a couple of chunks of ice from Hooper’s paws and his whiskers had icicles hanging from them, but he seemed interested in nothing but proceeding in a forward direction. I decided to hit the trail for a little while.

As we walked along the trail, I recalled the great hike Brenda, Bryce and I did up this trail last summer, and on we pushed, through the snow. I decided we should at least try to make it to treeline…

When you hike these high peaks, you eventually reach a point somewhere around 11,000’ there the oxygen is so thin, most vegetation gives up and heads for lower ground: treeline. You emerge from the cover of the thicket of trees and enter a rocky moonscape, windy and barren; ironically, I find myself the most alive when I’m up there.

And so when we emerged from the trees, and the winds began to blast us—no longer shielded by the trees—I concluded that we simply must continue on. I was not expecting to make the summit, but I wanted to press on for a little bit at least, in hopes of making the ridge before the final push to the summit where there are some spectacular views in their own right.

The winds picked up as we pressed on, and there was little shelter available for relief from the wind. Checking my watch I realized we had been walking for almost two hours, and simple math makes that out to be a four hour hike to the car, so I decided we were done for the day. I found a spot that wasn’t quite so windy, fed Hooper some food, and snapped a few pics:

Here’s my favorite picture from the day, with Hooper looking at some hikers on a lower peak while Long’s Peak looms in the background:

After that pic was taken, we headed back home, and arrived at the car three and a half hours after we left. Looking at a topo map after we got home, I estimate we turned around just a little short of the goal, but sill walked about ten miles in total and got up well over 12,000’ high. After giving him dinner, Hooper has been asleep ever since, but I think he’s proven his mountain mettle. Next summer is gonna be awesome. You’ll be seeing us on top of many high peaks, you can bank on it.

It’s been a while, again. First off, it’s Facebook’s fault. That’s right, I joined Facebook and I can’t seem to stop checking in every day to update my “status” message and see how many friends my friend Lauren has. But, that’s not the purpose of this post. Discussion on the insanely silly endeavor of Facebook will surely follow, maybe after Thanksgiving.

Anyway, Brenda has been working crazy hours again, and it all came to a head over the last couple-few weeks, and finally ended this past Thursday, when the show she was building some suits for opened at the University of Colorado. And it turns out that the guy who she was working for has a condo in the mountains that was going unused this weekend, so we loaded up the truck and moved to Keystone… resort that is; snowbarders, movie stars…

Brenda & I (and Hooper) had not been in the mountains in the winter yet since moving to Colorado, and it was fantastic. So far this year, old man winter has not really visited the near mountains but that’s ok with us since we’re not skiers or snowboarders. But this gave us a chance to experience a typical Colorado mountain resort town at the beginning of the high season, and it was certainly entertaining for us.

With Hooper settled in the condo, we headed out into the village to find some lunch. As we walked through “town” (Keystone resort is home to several fabricated centers of Starbucks and clothiers and liquor stores situated maze-like, Disney-style, around the lifts) we started to absorb the amalgam of skier/snowboarder fashion/lingo/gait/attitude. At one point Brenda said “uh, yeah, we’ve definitely entered a foreign world”, and I could only laugh and agree. I have been soaking up some of the lingo just from listening to office conversations about ski conditions (apparently the amount of base is important, and for some, a nice run of groomers is awesome, but that definitely outs you as a skier and the boarders will, like, totally frown on you), and I caught some glimpses of the fashions in the sale circulars every week last year, but it wasn’t until we walked through a living breathing throng of True Believers that I really came to grips with the odd, different, and let’s face it, totally cool world of alpine sports.

There’s a certain swagger that the snowboarders have; it almost seems like they’re fully conscious of the outlandishly baggy nylon clothes they’re wearing, emblazoned with obviously targeted graphics that they’ve paid a lot of money for, but don’t care (and to those of you that truly don’t care, I salute you; especially those that can’t really afford all that shit.

The skiers, then: they have this cool way of slinging their skis over one shoulder and hooking their arms over the end of the skis, backing that up with a swagger all their own, a more muted swagger that seems to say “we were her first, assholes, don’t fuck with us (but boy, it sure does seem like you guys are having a simpler, cooler time of things)”.

I was struck by the sense that this was one big party that I had no idea was going on (god dammit); at every bar (of which there were several), there were racks out front where people would leave their boards or skis, after a hard day of sliding down the slopes. My initial reaction was to look for some sort of locking mechanism, but there was none; these people were leaving their high priced equipment at the door, unlocked! This did not compute for this northeasterner. Inside, people sat around and ate and drank in the gear they wore all day as they careened down mountains on slippery planks of various sizes with no brakes. I felt inadequate. I ordered a beer. Here’s what we woke up to, out the front door of our place:

Brenda, Hooper and I made the best of our abilities by going on a couple of short hikes, punctuated with Hooper discovering his love of snow (or perhaps re-discovering; Hooper was a stray from Utah and we figure he was born around early February of 2007, so he’s probably no stranger to snow, but who knows?).

We left early on Sunday, took a scenic way home along the Peak-to-peak Highway, and got home in time to enjoy an early dinner at Zolo Grill, one of our favorite restaurants in Boulder. All in all, a great way to spend Brenda’s first free weekend in a long time.

DDC. Doggie Day Care. Hooper’s there right now. See for yourself right here; click the link for the webcams, and check out the action in play area two. It’s a full house today, and there are half a dozen black labs to boot, but you can still spot him; he’s the cutest one in the bunch.