I have a thing with Tuesdays. I call them Terrible Tuesdays. This started years ago when I had an office job - my reasoning was that on Monday you were fresh from the weekend and ready for the week, Wednesday you were half way there, Thursday is like the new Friday, and then there is Friday! Tuesday was nothing to look forward to and the weekend was nowhere in sight. Well, I have maintained the idea of "TT", and I am pretty sure these days I cause bad things to happen on Tuesdays just to fulfill the expectation that it will be a terrible day. This Tuesday lived up to that expectation.
I got to the park this morning with a great crew of spunky energetic pups. One of my favorite things is watching the dogs run in circles and chase each other for no reason - not chasing a toy or trying to hump another dog, just simply running for the fun of it. While the dogs were doing just that this morning, I was tromping around the extremely muddy field picking up after the dogs, or in this case, "bobbing for poops", as a dogwalker friend would call it. Just as I was thinking I should probably go back to the car and put on my rain pants since they dogs were getting so muddy and I would have a lot of hosing off to do, I got a big surprise. I started to turn and walk towards the truck, and the dogs ran right behind me, hitting me right behind my knees, causing me to fall backwards. It was all in slow motion, I felt myself going down, I tried to unsuccessfully grab onto a dog to break my fall and save myself from the inevitable mud bath, yelling out some sort of profanity as I went. Before I knew it, my butt was submerged in cold, wet, mud and "water". If you are familiar at all with the dog park, you know that the mud isn't exactly a typical water + dirt combo, ya know what I mean?! As I'm on the ground, I look around to see who witnessed my graceful landing. Nobody. Seriously!? This had to have been one of the highlights of my dogwalking career. Not something to be proud of, but you have to laugh it off, right?
In that we had just arrived at the park, I had at least an hour left to walk around the park with my freezing cold, wet, disgusting self. At least I wasn't concerned about the dogs getting me dirty! As time went on, I started to think in more and more detail how incredibly disgusting what I had just experienced really was.... and the fact that "it" was still on my skin. I've experienced a lot of nasty things working with dogs, but not many of them have actually made contact with my skin.
On the way home from the park, I took my dogs home as quickly as possible. When I was at Milkshake's house and taking him out of the truck, I noticed that one of the dogs smelled like they had been freshly bathed. I was envious of how clean they smelled, even after the park. I realized how wrong it was for me to be envious of how a dog smelled. So incredibly wrong. I did not see this coming when I was a girly-girl cocktail waitress... I stopped by the store on the way home, bought a 3-pack of dial bar soap, and instead having lunch, took a mid-day shower when I stopped by my house. Then took another after the 2nd park trip. Contemplating another before I go to bed.
I always tell myself, and the dogs, that I always win. No dog can out-stubborn me or out-smart me. At the end of the day, I am the human, I will win. Except today. Today, I have to give it to the dogs, they definitely won. It's like they hit the target and dropped their teacher in the dunk tank. Locked the babysitter out of the house. Knocked down the dogwalker.
Moral of the story? Don't stand in the mud. I have braced myself from dogs on a daily basis and prevented many falls, but the 3-4 inches of mud was just more than I could handle. Oh, and keep a change of clothes in the car. And a lof of anti-bacterial products.
