Friday, June 29, 2007

Too Hot To Handle

Summer has officially arrived and the current weather here in Florida is not very pug friendly.  Heck, it isn’t really people friendly either.  On some days it is downright hot.  Because of the heat, the pugs haven’t been keeping to their normal routine.  They no longer go out for a walk when I get off work, instead they just go out long enough to do their business and then everyone retreats back to the air conditioned house.

We have pushed their normal long walk back to around 9:30ish at night.  By this time, it is completely dark and while it is still hot, the pugs are able to cope with the heat.  In an ideal world, I would get up early and give the pugs a nice long walk in the morning before things warm up, but with my current work load and schedule that just isn’t going to happen.  I wish I could muster it, but I know for a fact that it just isn’t going to happen.

Because we have been walking so late at night, our walks have been restricted to just around the neighborhood.  On the weekends we usually try to go to the park or the beach or someplace fun, but since we are going out at odd hours of the night that pretty much rules all of those places out.  This is the hardest on Henry as he really likes to mix things up and he can easily get bored with walking the neighborhood each night.  We try to take a different route each night, but there are only so many possible combinations that is it pretty impossible to give Henry all the variety that he needs.

But despite the fact that they don’t get out nearly as much in the heat, the pugs are taking it all in stride.  They spend the cooler hours of the morning lounging around the pool and they move inside when it gets unbearably hot.  One day this week, Henry was laying outside soaking up the sun’s rays when I saw him get up and plop himself down on the first step of the pool.  This cracked me up because he has never gotten in the pool when no one else was swimming.  He just had all he could take of the sun and he just wanted to cool himself off.  When I went out to keep an eye on him, he looked at me like, “What, you do the same thing all the time!”

I’m glad to see that Henry is resourceful, but now I have to keep a really close eye on him because he knows that he can’t go swimming when there is no lifeguard on duty!