To bless or not to bless...

The dogs have been on a new exercise regimen of late.  The Blessing of the Pets will be coming up with St. Francis Day in early October and I want to be on top of last year's Hounds of Hell blessing/exorcism debacle.  My goal is to get them both in shape and better acclimated to a bit of sensible, sedate leash walking.

It's not going well.  Indeed, my plan may have been counterproductive as every day's walk is worse than the day before.





I am now into our second week of a morning walk.  As of Day 3, Cleo and Howie assumed they would be going for a walk the moment Will left on his bicycle for school.  Within seconds of his departure, the dogs are dancing at my feet, expectantly yapping at me to please hurry up. If I even go in the laundry room where the leashes reside, they go mad with joy.  When I am finally ready to go, they wiggle and squirm at my attempts to harness them up and bite each other's leash.  Over the summer Mary Rollins decided she would only take them for a walk if she could dress them in separate rooms.  She was worried that the noise from their happy-barks would damage our hearing. 

Just for fun, I googled around on Cesar Milan's website this morning to see if he had any advice specific to Jack Russell Terriers.  Curiously enough the picture on his page of "dog walking problems" is a Jack Russell.  After further searching, I found where he suggests that some Jack Russells can't actually be walked as run is their only speed and therefore are best walked while you, the human, have some sort of wheels attached to your body (i.e. biking or rollerblading).  Ha. 

Off we go this morning.  On the way out through the garage door, both dogs are doing the usual -- they have the bottoms of their leashes in the their mouths and are enthusiastically pulling me out the garage.   As I stop to punch the code closing the garage door, Cleo braces her legs and yanks the leash in her mouth with a perfect eighth note staccato rhythm that makes me laugh by myself hysterically.  Can't you hurry up!?!  Then, as shown in picture above, she manages to wrap the leash around her body twice! You may not realize what an amazing achievement this is.  Unfortunately, it's pretty hard to walk that way. 

After untangling everyone, and getting them to focus on our walking event, we pass our neighbor's house where two more Jack Russell terriers live.  That's right, there are four Jack Russell Terriers within two houses of each other.  That's a lot of terrierosterone.  Those Jacks are often out alone in their driveway incarcerated behind an invisible fence.  It's a shame the dogs aren't invisible, too.  When all dogs see each other, there's a whole lot of very frantic and very loud barking.  A couple of guys working at the house across the street also start laughing.  Eventually, we are back to walking.  I can hear my iPod again and all is well.  Until we pass the spot where Pookin the cock-a-poo and Chloe, the Yorkshire terrier, are out in their respective yards across the street from each and we reenact last year's Blessing of the Pets all over again.  Then, we see a squirrel.  Then, we see a chipmunk. 

At a party at our house yesterday with some church friends, I was retelling the story of having the worst dogs in the world.  Cleo & Howie had just been complimented on their quiet, sweet demeanor --.  Why, Gwen, these are the nicest Jack Russell Terriers I've ever met!  Really? I felt it necessary to share the darker truths of how poorly mannered, loud and obnoxious they are in the company of other dogs.  Someone said, "Oh I can beat that.  We once had a rescue dog named Angel.  We took her to get blessed on St. Francis Day and she got her leash tangled around another parishioner's legs and knocked her to the ground.  The lady began to bleed and had gravel in her wounds that had to be cleaned out.  Father Russell suggested that next year, we should just bring a photo of our dog."

And so, as entertaining as our morning walks are, maybe this year we'll just bless the cat so no one gets hurt.