Small Dog + Snow
15 Feb 2022 07:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cimoreneWe dogsat Luci the little Havanese overnight Friday. Ever since the first time she stayed with us for a week last year, we have been added to Luci's list of friends she's excited to see, and it's very gratifying to be met by that much excitement in a tiny little wiggly package! Luci is pretty much the perfect size for a teddy bear, and in her puppy cut she pretty much looks like a teddy bear at first glance too. She is the size of a small footstool and obviously does not weigh very much.
We've had a great deal of snowfall lately, and then the temperature went and seesawed back and forth around the freezing point, so the snow started to melt very very slowly, not enough to make it melt away, and all the pathways of trampled snow turned into rivers of ice, and the top layer of the snow has hardened into a very crunchy crust from melting and refreezing. When I walked after Luci over the deep snow off the paths, instead of making deep footprints like you get in soft or slushy snow, sometimes my foot wouldn't even break through the crust, and in other places I got this funny effect where my foot became the bottom of a bowl-shaped depression made of spiderwebbed tiny cracks in the ice - but the sheet stayed in one piece.
Luci, in contrast, mostly didn't make any impression on the surface of the snow at all (although she did manage to find a few places soft enough to take her tiny pawprints). She didn't need to wear her winter coat and she didn't get cold at all. In fact, she had a great time and got the zoomies and wanted to roll around on the ground and rub her face in the ice.
When walking around outside without a dog, one tends to keep to the pathways, which have been trampled, melted into ice, and then graveled. The gravel makes a pretty good surface to walk on, but there are spots where it's lacking, so I've also been wearing spikes on my boots. And at work the store keeps selling out of spikes, all except the little mini ones that only go under the ball of your foot (not as good as the ones that also go around and under the heel).
We've had a great deal of snowfall lately, and then the temperature went and seesawed back and forth around the freezing point, so the snow started to melt very very slowly, not enough to make it melt away, and all the pathways of trampled snow turned into rivers of ice, and the top layer of the snow has hardened into a very crunchy crust from melting and refreezing. When I walked after Luci over the deep snow off the paths, instead of making deep footprints like you get in soft or slushy snow, sometimes my foot wouldn't even break through the crust, and in other places I got this funny effect where my foot became the bottom of a bowl-shaped depression made of spiderwebbed tiny cracks in the ice - but the sheet stayed in one piece.
Luci, in contrast, mostly didn't make any impression on the surface of the snow at all (although she did manage to find a few places soft enough to take her tiny pawprints). She didn't need to wear her winter coat and she didn't get cold at all. In fact, she had a great time and got the zoomies and wanted to roll around on the ground and rub her face in the ice.
When walking around outside without a dog, one tends to keep to the pathways, which have been trampled, melted into ice, and then graveled. The gravel makes a pretty good surface to walk on, but there are spots where it's lacking, so I've also been wearing spikes on my boots. And at work the store keeps selling out of spikes, all except the little mini ones that only go under the ball of your foot (not as good as the ones that also go around and under the heel).
