Willow & Friends
Aug 22nd, 2008 by Ashok
As promised, here are some recent pics of Willow with a couple of friends. Different days, different times…and yes, different dogs.
Excuse the blurry pics–if you’ve spent time around puppies then you know that trying to take pictures of them is similar to taking pictures from a moving ST bus on a back road of Maharashtra (or anywhere else). They tend to be hyperkinetic, and just getting them in the frame is tough. I guess using an iPhone camera doesn’t help because the iPhone camera (like most cellphone cams) can be a bit slow in responding. So I get a lot of pics with nobody in the frame! These are relatively good ones, as puppy pics go.
The first few are of Willow and Magic, a cocker spaniel, and they’re taken on the Lokhandwala back road on a monsoon morning. Both Willow and Magic basically turn into blurs when they meet, leaping and jumping around like crazy. It’s a treat to watch, and no easy job taking pictures of them in action while still holding on to Willow’s leash. Willow has this thing she does: she circles the other dog, crouches, barks like crazy (Basset Hounds have a disproportionately loud bark for their size), then leaps forward to kiss (licking is kissing among dogs) the other dog, then leaps away before the other dog can kiss/lick her. Repeat ad infinitum till both dogs are exhausted. Incidentally, there are three cocker spaniels named Magic in our area, so I guess it’s a popular name among cockers, the way ‘Bruno’ seems to proliferate among Labs.
The next few are of Willow and Weed, the retriever-mix puppy that lives in the same building. They’re taken downstairs on one of Willow’s evening ‘walks’. (She much prefers playing with other puppies to walking in the evenings. Walking is for mornings.) And the rest are all of Weed and Willow on one of Weed’s visit to our place. They get up to a bit of mischief, and Weed harasses the life out of Willow at time. She’s so sweet, she rolls over on her back and lets him dominate her, which is not always a good thing with male playmates, for reasons obvious to anyone who’s owned a female dog in heat.
But Weed is a sweetheart, even if he is a typically dominating male alpha dog (you can delete the ‘dog’ and the rest would apply to most Indian males, present company excluded). I call him ‘Weedu Weenod Chopra’ for that reason. I won’t be surprised if he tries to get his crap nominated for an Oscar. (!) :~)
The last few are pics of Willow in the municipal ‘garden’ opposite our building, which is water-logged with rain puddles and hugely overgrown grass (way above my head in some patches). The black dog is Son of Skid, a stray that lives in the newly constructed building and whom I named SoS because he looks so much like a possible offspring of a black lab that lives in our building (and who’s since been neutered, so can’t procreate more). Of course, I don’t have the results of the DNA paternity test, so maybe he’s not SoS after all, just a good-looking stray. But I wonder…
