And now I can die happy, for I have met Howie the Dog.
The move has meant everyone at work has new neighbors, and so I have got to know different people. (The woman I saw "Bowling for Columbine" with? Barely knew her name before October.) So I was passing the time of day with someone ages ago and saw on her shelf a picture. A picture of a dog. Of Howie the Dog.
Howie the Dog is half basset hound and half dalmatian. He has a slightly larger than average basset shape, dalmatian spots, and a basset's loveability (I have seldom heard of or met a dalmatian with a nice personality). In the photograph, he was sitting, which always looks ridiculous (read: loveable) in a basset anyway, with his head turned up a little so his ears looked even longer, and had slightly lifted one paw, kind of demurely.
I was in love.
This woman lives nearby and I pass near her house on my bike commute. I have been kind of hopeful that what finally happened yesterday would eventually happen. As I turned onto the bike route, at the bottom of a slope a short block away was a long, low, spotty dog, on a leash with two humans. There could be only one. I yelled, "Howie!" and sped down the hill.
My coworker took a moment to recognize me in helmet and sunglasses but I tumbled (on purpose, I feel I should clarify) off the bike and into Howie's lap, or vice-versa. What a great dog. He loved me immediately, tried to burrow under my skin to get closer, and eagerly welcomed all my fondling and cooing. (Oh, and I met her husband. I'm sure he is very nice but suspect he was taken aback by my rambunctious exuberance.) Howie is black and white, like magpies and penguins and some painted ponies; and he is spotted but has nearly solidly black ears, which a dog ought to have if it possibly can. He even matched my bike, I observed aloud, white with black, except he was not a hardtail. His entire stern, not just his tail, wagged joyfully. He clearly had not been pet or flubbered or loved in any way at all in simply years, very shocking behavior on his parents' part. He needed to be skritched and made to kick his leg by rubbing his belly in the right spot (literally: his markings made it easy to locate and remember the right place) and of course his ears folded in many different ways. One day, I will count all his spots and tickle them all.
O My Friends and Brothers, I like me like that. My coworker is fairly used to me bounding into her office to tell her new fun gossip or telling outrageous stories. It is rare these days for me to be so confident that my behavior is perfectly correct and that if it's wrong I don't want to be right. Meeting Howie the Dog was therefore uplifting in two ways.
Allons en Europe!
RDC has a business trip (let us all slap our palms to our foreheads in sympathy) to Paris. Two years ago I didn't go to Northern Ireland with him and I've never particularly gotten over it. We were going to go away for my birthday anyway, either a day's drive to South Dakota to see Crazy Horse and Mt. Rushmore or a Surprise for me that RDC was plotting for me in Colorado, and, as my sister said last night, Rapid City, Paris, what's the difference?
I'll take the TGV to visit Emlet for the days that RDC is working. Nisou and SPG are going à Bretagne over the weekend, so unless Nisou brings Emlet to Paris instead he still won't get to see them, but these are details we have yet to hash out.
I am going to see the chapel that Melissa recommended last time, and eat glace on the Île de St. Louis as Lucy recommended, and go the Louvre and the Rodin and maybe the Pompidou and the Tour d'Eiffel.
Wheeeeeee!