The last couple of days it has been windy. The kind of windy where you look out and find your lawn furniture resting inexplicably in the next door neighbor’s yard. I am very much enjoying the shift in the weather. It has gotten colder and clearer and the few trees that have the capacity to change color are doing their part to make up for all those slacker evergreens that dominate this county. Stella’s soccer game tomorrow is about 45 minutes east from here and I am looking forward to seeing fall from an inlander’s perspective.

Aside from Mother Nature’s lawn-furniture relocation program, she has also rolled out the fence and barrier quality assurance testing. Yesterday when I pulled into the driveway I noticed not one, but two furry faces staring out at me over our white picket fence. Looks like the neighborhood dogs got the memo that wind+fence=freedom. Turns out, that other furry face was the neighbor dog, Shatzie, who we watch regularly in his yard a couple of houses down. He is probably one of the biggest, furriest and sweetest German Shepherds I have ever met and I have always wanted to get him and Ranger together for a run around the yard. However, I have always stopped short of asking the neighbor for a doggie play-date lest I give the impression that I am one of those creepy dog people. You know the kind.

The way our gate works, it is easy to push open from the outside, but once inside, those without opposable thumbs have a difficult time getting out without the assistance of a quick physics lesson. So basically, once Shatzie got in, he was stuck. I don’t know how long they had been hanging out, but I do know that the back of Ranger’s neck was covered in slobber (Shatzie’s head completely clears Ranger’s back — the dude is HUGE) and they were both panting so hard I thought they were going to pass out. And when I took this picture, it captured the exact expression that Ranger had on his face for the entire rest of the day – the expression that basically said, this was the best day of my life.