The Dog Park Is Now A Daily Ritual

While I was wandering around happily taking pictures in Victoria’s Chinatown yesterday morning, Paulette was home working away in our front yard.  She was cutting, chopping and trimming shrubs, trees and pampas grass.  When I arrived home, the front yard had about a dozen piles of clippings that needed to be loaded into our utility trailer, and then of course, taken to the recycling center.  Seems to me I just did this a few days ago.  But, I guess it does look a lot better and surely this load of clippings is the last for this year!

We had to take Rylie to the Vet yesterday at noon for her Rabies vaccination shot.  We decided to go to the dog park first, so we loaded Molly and Rylie in the van at 11:00 and headed off. 

This trip to the dog park has quickly turned into a daily ritual – Molly and Rylie just love going to the park and seeing all the other dogs.  Today, we all met ‘Amigo’, a beautiful 2 yr. old Portugese Water Dog, he is a spitting image of the videos I’ve seen on TV of President Obama’s dog Bo!  This is the first dog of that breed I’ve run across and what a great dog – friendly, gentle and extremely playful.

It’s always intrigued me to see how dogs develop a sense of ‘time’, or habit.  They seem to know when it’s time to go for their daily walks, time for dinner and bed time.  Both Molly and Rylie have caught on to the Dog Park time too – only after going there for 4 or 5 days.  Now, somewhere between 11:00 and 1:00 when we normally take them, both dogs start to get antsy and excited and follow us all over the house just waiting for the magic words “let’s go to the dog park”! 

I’m a little over 200 pages into The Lost Symbol, Dan Brown’s follow up novel to The Da Vinci Code.  As usual, it is a fast-paced thriller complete with puzzles, mythology, codes and secrets of art, architecture and history.  I really like novels that include historical facts in the plot and Dan Brown is a master at doing that.

For instance, here is a quote from the book that really got me thinking - “Some found it suspicious that The Great Seal of the United States has 13 stars, 13 arrows, 13 pyramid steps, 13 shield stripes, 13 olive leaves, 13 olives, 13 letters in annuit coeptis, 13 letters in e pluribus unum and on and on.”  Aha!  A giant conspiracy of some kind, right?  Wrong!

Intrigued by so many 13’s, I just had to find out why and, with the help of Google, discovered a completely innocent and plausible explanation.  It is in honor of the fact that there were originally 13 States in the Union – that is the only reason 13 is so common in the seal.  The fact that there are 13 letters in the 2 latin mottos, appears to be just coincidence.

I’m sure though, that every American reading this blog already knew this right?  The symbolism of so many 13’s in the Great Seal probably came as no surprise at all to any of you!  Dan Brown’s books are full of little nuggets like this, and that plus his suspenseful plots, is what makes his novels best sellers, I guess.