What I do for you.

Having a dog means having a child. You have to care for it everyday. You have to teach it every day. You have to be patient, and kind, but still strong and firm. Dogs are not on auto-pilot. I have met so many people who get a dog thinking that it will sit, stay, roll over and beg all on it's own. I have met people who think they can get a dog and keep the dog outside all day and then let it in one day and it will know just on its own how to behave indoors. But dogs are work. Lots and Lots and lots of fucking work.
And this dog. This Monster of a Dog keeps the work coming.
Callie as her birth certificate reads is for the most part a very calm, loving dog, but she is after all a Labrador retriever. A dog bred for long hikes up mountains, fast running, and an intense desire to learn....ie she needs to be able to run. Dogs, like children, need to be constantly stimulated or they will act out. Now your kid might throw a tantrum in the mall. Where your dog will poop in your favorite pair of shoes. The two are really the same. After all either way your still walking through shit.
So we knew moving into this house with no fence that it would mean having to build a fence. We also knew that having to build a fence would mean having to learn how to build a fence as we were building a fence. Lucky for us we both grew up in a small enough town where this way of learning on your toes was acceptable. The fence building itself was not the hard part. The hard part was doing it with tools we had to invent because the military shop that said they had all the tool needed must have never build a fence because they had NONE of the tools we needed. But we made do with what we had and it didn't hurt that my father is down right awesome sometimes and was willing to ship some of the tools to us and he'll take them pack home when he visit in September...Thank you Dad.
So we got the tool thing worked out. done.
checked off our list and ready to move on to more important things....like building the actual fence.
What we didn't think about, and perhaps should have been the more obvious of things was the fact that it was an over-cast day. As a photographer I should know that an overcast does can be deceiving. One might see this day and think to themselves "Ugh there no light." but really the light is abundant. It's like when you're driving down the road and you feel like you want to squint your eyes because the light so bright but at the same time you can't put sun glasses on because it's too "dark" to wear them. That is happening because the world has become it's own little light box and the light is coming at you from all angles and it's coming at you nice and strong. An overcast day is a day for sun screen and garden hats, however it is the one type of day we most doubt the need for such things. I know this. I have known this for many years. This should have been tattooed on my ass because this is something that I KNOW so well. But we did not wear sun screen. We did not wear sun hats, and we did not wear long sleeve shirts.
With that wonderful fence building finished and out of the way we filled our glasses up with ice cold water, sat back and took a deep long breath......and then we cried. We cried because our once powder sugar white skin had now turned the lovely color of apple red. It hurts to the touch.
It is filled with painful, awful mind numbingly, tear inducing, agony.
But the fence is done. The dog has freedom. My job as her parent and pack leader is still intact.
Now I need aloe, an ice pack, and a martini....stat.

Comments

[Stefanie]

Vinegar...lots and lots of vinegar. It will help "heal" the sunburns in a day and not hurt. Also, turn them a nice brown, and very little peeling. It works great! Yes, you will stink, but it's definitely worth it! :)