Moving....across town

Much to Sparkie's dismay, when she woke up, all the people and all the agility equipment was gone. Since we were just moving about 10 miles away we stayed at the fairgrounds until mid-day.

I had decided to walk around for a while and wanted to take one of the dogs with me. Slugger normally just stops in one place to look around for 10-15 minutes at a time. Sparkie goes this way and that a hundred miles an hour. So Wazzu was the obvious choice.

Wrong. Wazzu got to the trees and saw squirrels. Now she didn't want to move! I tried to be patient for a few minutes but she showed no sign of moving on and I really needed to move. So I left her and walked the field around and around. Even though she was only a dot from that distance I could see that she hadn't moved. She was like a little statue. Forty five minutes later she was still there. She didn't want to come when we finally called her to come in.

We moved to a place a called Winter Quarters Manatee. It is just on the outskirts of the Tampa area. It is a huge community on a very large lake. There are over 450 spots. I'd say at least half of them are permanent "mobile" homes. They are fixed up so beautifully. There is an extremely large clubhouse that seems very active. This is a park where they come around and pick up your garbage each day. And riding in the cart that pulls the garbage trailer is a sweet, tan, and very happy pit bull. He sure seems to love riding around in that cart. You couldn't get Slugger in that thing in a million years! After all it looks almost like that puppy eating machine we tried to get him to ride in when he was little. (It was a small John Deere tractor pulling a little garden trailer.)

Anyway, since it's in the mid 80's, we thought it would be a perfect place for Slugger to go swimming. That is, until they told us there were alligators in the lake! I'm afraid to even let him sit in the nice little yard Mike made the dogs! So no swimming, but it is very beautiful here and the people here are all very friendly. Since this is one of the only parks to not have age or dog restrictions there are lots of dogs here. And as we all would expect, there is lots of love here and lots of very friendly people.

Being warm and next to a lake we are getting swarmed with these tiny little bugs…like gnats. They are so little you can just barely see them. But being so little it’s hard to kill them. They are swarming me – how bothersome. And they bite! I keep feeling all these little bites. When I try to kill them I just end up hitting myself and the bugs get away. So Mike got out the vacuum and tried to suck a bunch of them up. He got a lot but certainly not all. So even though it’s warm I think we’re going to have to keep most of the windows shut as they are so small they come right through the screens. Oh, such troubles we have!


Debbie
11/27/06