Emma opts in

Or maybe, Emma opts out of out.

Emma in late 2004 being throttled by strange man.

That’s actually my best friend Joe holding Emma because he wanted his picture taken with her. What? They don’t come much stranger than Joe.

So this morning I was roused by Joe calling at 9:25. He announced it was time to go to Village Inn. I said I needed to put on pants or they wouldn’t let me in. He said he had a stop on the way, and then he’d go and grab us a booth.

I went stumbling about trying to get myself as close to passable as was going to happen. It’s my custom before going out to send Emma outside to “go potty.” That’s actually the command she had been taught to follow when I got her (about a month shy of five years ago, in fact, and about half a year before the above pic was taken.) It means basically she goes out, does her thing, and then comes right back in.

Except when I told her to “go potty,” she wouldn’t. She just kept her big face buried in her favorite pillow on the sofa and pretended to be asleep. An effect unfortunately vitiated because she kept opening an eye a slit to see if I was buying it.

Y’know what? I let her. As it happened she’d gone out to do her business an hour or so before, so I doubted there was any real urgency. And while I’m not best pleased when she doesn’t obey, the fact is she’s such an awfully good dog I’m inclined to cut her some slack. Especially since she hates cold wind as much as I do.

Given that she’s a Sino-Canadian breed mix (Shar pei and Black Lab – or as I call it, Black Sharpie) you’d think she’d be pretty inured to cold. Wrong. Like the other dogs I’ve had she’s happy with cool, even very cool weather. Wind or really bitter cold she’s got no taste for.

Her pulling her sleeping act was better than it might have been. One especially frigid night the first winter she was with us – about the time the picture above was taken, likely – she tried to avoid going outside by pretending to be dead.

If you’re wondering why I don’t post a more current picture of Emma, the fact is I still don’t have a digital camera. Not of consequence, anyway; there’s one in my cell phone. And indeed the picture I snapped of Emma makes an okay  wallpaper on the phone (under sufficiently broad conditions of “okay.”) You can actually make out some highlights on the little bitty image on the screen. Any larger and it unaccountably becomes the image of an utterly featureless Emma-shaped shadow.

Ah, well. At least if Emma gets stiffed of a walk today because of weather, she’s not going to be real unhappy.

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