Walking After Midnight

Alice, my parents' dog in all her beautious
glory!

As you already know, I have a dog named Betty. What I didn’t tell you is that I haven’t exactly been walking her as much as I should. My goal is to make sure Betty gets to go on a walk every day, because she really enjoys walking, and it will also help keep her weight down. My parents also have a dog, and her name is Alice. Alice and Betty spend a lot of time together, because while I am at work Betty goes up to my parents’ house and spends the day there. I am very fortunate that I get to take Betty to my parents’ for doggy daycare. Although my mom is usually very busy during the day, she is sometimes home, and is able to let the dogs outside and keep them company.

Betty and Alice obviously love each other, and they get quite excited when they see each other each morning. Plus, you know how when you have a dog, and sometimes you are trying to get your dog to do something and your dog doesn’t want to do it? Like, sometimes I want Betty to get up in the morning to go down to my parents’ house, but, because Betty loves sleeping, she has no desire to get up from either my bed or her doggie bed. I talk to her, and tell her, “Let’s go,” which sometimes gets her up, but often she just ignores this command and goes back to sleep. Well, if I say, “Come on, Betty, let’s go see Alice,” she will jump right up and run to the front door. And, while I am not proud of it, I have also occasionally used this line to get Betty to come in from outside when she has not wanted to, but at times when we were not about to see Alice. Seeing her excited face looking for her buddy as she runs into the house has been enough to make me tell her we are going to see Alice to get her to come in only in dire situations, like when she wants to go outside at three in the morning, and I am dying to go back to sleep, but she just wants to stand out in the yard and eat grass.

Anyway, I have decided that I really want to try and walk Betty every day, and I have known that my parents also want to walk Alice every day. The problem for all of us is our lack of free time to do so. Now, I know that just about everybody suffers from a lack of free time, because we are all so busy, and we don’t have many opportunities to just do what we want to do, or, when we do have time to do something like walk our dogs, we are so tired from meeting all of our other obligations that we just end up face planting on the sofa and sleeping while we watch reruns of Chopped on the Food Network.

But, alas!—my parents and I have decided to finally do something about this problem. We have started getting up really early to walk the dogs each day. And, by really early, I mean just before 5 AM. We have to get up this early because I like to be at work before 7 AM, plus, my dad leaves for work each day at 6 AM. When I get up and the clock still starts with the number 4, I am often confused as to what day it is, and 4:50 AM also feels a little bit like the middle of the night. But, so far I have managed to get myself up for two days in a row to go on our walks. I have not been using the Wake n’ Shake alarm clock because it leaves me feeling beaten up and abused for about 15 minutes after it goes off, and instead I am just using my plain old iPhone alarm. For some reason this has worked so far, and I hope that I don’t slowly become immune to it and unable to get my butt out of bed in the morning.

When my parents and I go out walking, we make a loop through our neighborhood that takes about 20-25 minutes to complete. During our walks we are able to talk and catch up on things, plus, because my mom is very observant, I have been learning things about my neighborhood that I never realized before. Yesterday, for example, I learned that this condo building we walk by is a smoke-free building, and that you can only smoke in designated smoking areas out back. Since I am not a smoker, and I am not looking to buy a condo, this knowledge is not really that relevant to me, but, in case I ever get the hankering to smoke the occasional cigar in the lobby of a strange condo, I will know not to choose that one!

When we walk we also get the satisfaction of seeing how happy the dogs are each morning, and we get to know that they have had a good start to their days, and that they have actually used the bathroom while they are outside. Sometimes in the morning I have let Betty out into the yard to go to the bathroom, but because all she wants to do is get back inside to go back to bed, she won’t do it. When we go on our walks, though, Betty loves wetting as many yards as possible, and will go, like, 16 times on one walk.

Lovely Betty likes to eat food off the ground
while we walk.

Although walking in the mornings is great, there are still a couple of problems. First, as I am walking down the street to meet up with my parents, I often get creeped out by the dark, and, particularly since I watched the movie Insidious over the weekend, I will imagine I feel the eyes of a dark, scary creature on my back. I combat this feeling by either waiting for them on the bench under the big, bright streetlight, or by walking all the way down to their house and standing by the mailbox light, if I get there before they come out.

The other problem with walking so early in the morning is that it is sometimes hard to see what the dogs are doing in the dark. It can be difficult, for example, to make sure they are not in someone’s flowerbed, or going to the bathroom in a yard that has a sign that indicates that no dogs should use the bathroom there. Also, yesterday, as we were walking down the street, Betty ate something off the ground, and I have no idea what it was, or if it was even edible. I am hoping it was food someone had dropped, and not something really disgusting or something that will make her sick. I used to have another dog, a beagle named Lula who passed away in 2012, and Lula was renowned for eating things off the ground. When a house was being built in the neighborhood several years ago, Lula found a Quick Trip chimichanga on the ground that one of the construction workers had obviously left, and she gobbled that sucker up in about two seconds flat! Hopefully Betty will not become as accomplished at illicit eating as Lula was!

Walking the dogs with my parents early in the morning brings many rewards, although getting up super-early can be difficult. By the end of the day I am pretty tired, which means I sleep well, but also that I fall asleep by, like, 9 PM. Still, the time it gives me with my parents, and the fact that my dog is getting exercise are both worth it, and I am lucky to be able to do it every day. In fact, if you have a dog and parents who live nearby, I recommend that you try it. Just watch out for errant food in the road as you pass!