Dogs and Dreams

I just got back from an hour and a half walk with my dogs. I took them to Duke Gardens. If you know my dogs, the gardens, and kind of day it was, then you'll see it was asking for trouble. Don't get me wrong, I love my dogs, the gardens are beautiful, and it was a lovely day, but the combination was off. My dogs are sweeties, one loves people and dogs and chasing anything that moves and is smaller than her and is also more than a little nuts. She's a Border Collie mix, she can't really help it. The other is terrified of people, and cars, and other dogs that act unfriendly, and is territorial and nervous. She can't help it, she was abused, and Chows don't tend to be well adjusted dogs anyways. So here I have one dog pulling towards people and animals and one pulling away, I have them on a twin leader to balance them out a little, they pull against each other instead of me. And then there are the gardens, they're lovely. Winding paths, open fields, duck and goose dotted ponds, fountains, gazebos, and plants, everywhere beautiful plants from all over the world. Lots of asian plants and things you can't find in every back yard. And today, it was warm but not hot, a little overcast, and breezy. So the gardens were full of people, lovers laying on blankets in the sun, mothers showing small children flowers, college students playing frizbee and ball and walking around, people walking their dogs, people talking in the shade. So my chow was freaking out, as we got farther from home on the walk there she started to get nervous and once we got there she was pulling away from people or just refusing to move if they got too close. She's a beautiful dog so everyone wants to stop and comment on her, they really want to pet her fluffy head and look at her almost human eyes but she doesn't want them anywhere near her. And then my border collie is pulling towards people, wanting to meet other dogs and get her head scratched. But above anything else, what she really wants to do is chase things, squirrels, ducks, geese, smaller dogs, songbirds, fish, frogs, rabbits, anything that will run away from her. So after the half hour walk to get there and walking around the outer edge of the gardens, fighting the dogs to move forward and not chase things and stay on the paths as much as possible, which I'm guessing was another half hour but I didn't pay very close attention, it starts to rain. Turns out that overcast sky meant business. So now people are hurry, horror of horrors, running, towards the exit. And I can't get my dog to move at all. She pulls off into a flower bed and sits down. So I stop and reassure her, because I have a ways to walk so I'm going to get wet anyways and it's not her fault that people freak her out. So I wait for a gap in the outgoing crowd and move forward a little more. A family in front of me notices my dear little chow and slows down to look at her, speaking to each other in chinese. We near the gate and she pulls me off the path and refuses to move. So I wait for another bigger gap and get through the gate. From there to the street isn't far and then it's just cars and rain and crossing the road back and forth to stay on the sidewalked side till we get home. I poured them a great big bowl of fresh water when we got home, they're good dogs, my silly babies. I feel like I got a complete work out, between walking so far and using my arms and legs to wrangle the dogs.
I worked a short shift this morning, picked up one from someone who wanted to go home for the weekend. Four hours feels insanely short after nine hours on your feet a few days prior.
I had a weird dream a few nights ago, it was a really long dream.I don't remember a lot of the details now but there were lots of zombies in it. I was in a house that had several floors of basement that were all crumbling and dusty and wooden, but the upper part of the house was brick. The basement had a big open middle that spanned a couple of stories, like a grand ballroom almost. Thinking of it now the house was pretty much structurally impossible, but whatever. There were zombies at the beginning of the dream that weren't that mean or scary and they spoke and remembered who they had been and didn't try to attack me. But the more of them there were and the deeper into the basement I went the more danger they became to me. Eventually I knew I had to burn the house to destroy them, and I knew that the upper stories of the house would be fine and it wouldn't collapse. So I started burning things, and the zombies got angrier. To the point where I was having to burn them as they came at me and they were trying to keep me from escaping the fire. But I wasn't really that scared of the zombies, even though they were pretty creepy looking and they did want to kill me. They just didn't seem all that bent on it, more like animals of darkness disturbed than flesh eating undead.