Crazy Dog Lady Goes to College

Took the girls up to the University today for more socialization.  I haven't been up there in a million years.  Well except a few years ago an art grad student commissioned me to hypnotize her drawing class.  That was fun and interesting.  But other than that, I haven't had a reason to go there and when I attended I was on the engineering campus which is somewhat removed from the main campus with the pretty buildings and grassy areas.  I was trying to remember if there was even a quad sort of area.

We had a little adventure right at the start because I decided to park in the commercial area right next to campus and pulled up right next to a group of noisy, high, guitar playing homeless hippies complete with pitbull.  In between singing they were yelling loudly at anybody who would pay attention to them though it was more obnoxious 'pay attention to me' than aggressive.  Which pretty much sums up all of Boulder no matter the social class.  Anyway.  To add to the fun as I was unloading the dogs some cops came up to move the loud hippies along.  'Business owners were complaining', the cops told them.  We moved along and when I came back a half hour later they were gone.

We walked through the campus town a bit and then over to the university.  It turns out there is a nice big grassy sorta quadrangle type area and I stumbled on it right away.  And right away a big off leash Bernese Mountain Dog came running over and scared the crap out of Tess.  'He's really really friendly,' the stereotypical ditzy blonde yelled at me.  'She's really really scared,' I yelled back.  Efforts to contain the behemoth were minimal and largely unsuccessful but thankfully he never came right up to us.  Ruby made sure of that.  And I reassured Tess, told her she was fine, thankfully the dog didn't have evil on his mind. 

There were lots of people and skateboards and bikes and some guy doing I don't know what, some weird kind of break dancing or something.  Right next to break dancing guy another dog started to come up to her but this one was super calm and didn't too terribly close.  Ruby was too busy rolling around in the grass to sound the alarm and Tess was fine.  Then a college girl lying on the grass spotted Tess and jumped up and ran over to pet her, all excited.  Ruby went right up to her so Tess went as well and got some snugs off the girl.  Was happy that she did well with that.  She's doing much better with strangers wanting to say hi and pet her.  Ruby is super helpful there.  We were downtown on Sunday and Tess was actually going up to some people on her own, very encouraging.

Then the classes got out and suddenly there were hordes of people.  More bikes, more skateboards, a couple guys on crutches, all the 'scary to dogs' stuff.  She wasn't thrilled but she did o.k., no freezing, nervous for sure but she managed it.  She was happy to get back to the car though.  In all I'd guess we were out 25 minutes or so.

No photos from our outing but both girls were out cold afterwards.  Socializing is hard work.

Some recent photos.