Big Brass Ones

Just two wild and crazy guys

Or: Up the down waterfall

Or: A brace of mallards on the Mesa pond

Or: Yap, yap, yappin' at Dexter's door

Hmmm. I'm thinking I've got way more prospective titles today than actual entry to justify them. Can't be helped, I s'pose.

For nearly five years now, the biped and I have been hiking up to the Mesa pond at Garland Park just about every Saturday morning. And, almost unfailingly, we hike up the Mesa trail and down the (much steeper) Waterfall trail. That is the right and proper way to do the loop. That is the sensible way to do the loop (we Gordons are very big on sensible--you could ask anybody). Every once in a great while--when the biped's knee is giving him the odd twinge, I'm thinking--we go both up and down the Mesa trail. But never, in my experience, have we gone up the Waterfall trail.

Until this morning. Given that the bipedess is in Memphis (Tennessee, not Egypt) this weekend, perhaps the biped felt it was a case of when-the-cat's-away-the-mice-will-play. Perhaps he just wanted to let his hair down (Jeez, I slay myself!). If he was thinking that by hiking the loop backwards he could turn back time to an epoch in which the mesa sported a porta-potty, then he was even sadlier mistaken than he usually is.

But anyway, we two wild and crazy guys went up the down Waterfall trail this morning. And arrived at the Mesa pond to find a brace of mallards thereon. Which is only mildly unusual and hardly worth mentioning--I just wanted to use the word brace.

I didn't even bother to try to run off the duckies. The last time I did, I promptly found myself in water so deep that I was obliged to swim. Which I am very good at of course, but do not greatly enjoy.

Instead, I contented myself with chasing red-wing blackbird shadows on the far side of the pond.

Which endeavor I was engaged in when three dogs and their corresponding bipeds happened by. There was a perfectly polite collie of some sort, a dachshund who was so unobtrusive as almost to escape notice, and a yappy little terrier whose exact parentage I would not care to comment upon.

The moment the terrier saw me across the pond, it commenced to yap incessantly. I thought I would gallop on around and see what it wanted. It yapped viciously until I was perhaps 50 yards away. Then it suddenly discovered an abiding interest in its biped's off-side shoe.

Well, that's all I've got, Littermates. I told you the titles were better than the entry.