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Sophie swims seeking squirrel
Monday, October 4 1999
I took the day off of work just because I felt like I had too much to do before leaving for New Orleans tomorrow. I sent an email to some of my co-workers telling them about a couple robots they'd need to run in my absence and left things at that.
In the evening, I took Sophie on a run to Dog Beach. It was an off day in the off season so there weren't many people or dogs there. But there was this one relentless Rotweiler who kept expressing unusual amounts of interest in Sophie, and she became so fed up with him that she took to charging at him and snapping her teeth while squealing her "Okay, I'm scared of you asshole!" squeal.
She and I made it all the way to the easternmost point of the Dog Beach sand bar, as far upstream as one can go on the swath of sand choking the mouth of the San Diego River. It was high tide, and at such times this point is cut off on two sides by fairly deep channels of water. Suddenly, though, Sophie's attention was drawn to a little Mexican squirrel across the water on the south shore. The squirrel was making a loud noise trying to drag a fast food wrapper and some article of food through the rip-rap rocks of his riverside retreat. It was too much to bear; Sophie started swimming across the water.
I knew that once she was across there would be no way to get her back. So I did what I had to, I waded across. The water was a good three and a half feet deep, and its bottom was a mix of muddy clay and slippery rocks. But, being somewhat isolated from ocean currents, at least the water was fairly warm. When Sophie was done with her nonsense (she never caught the squirrel of course), I put her on the leash and we walked home along the edge of some athletic fields. A little kid on the corner of Voltaire and Cable asked me how I'd come to be so wet and I told him the story.
In the evening Steph and EJ cooked up a dinner of shark. (EJ had received the shark steaks as a "tip" while operating his bike cab in downtown San Diego.) Later Kim brought out a birthday cake and we celebrated EJ's 27th birthday for the second day in a row. Here's the key to lighting 27 candles on a cake: start in the middle and work outwards. I nearly lost all the hair on my knuckles doing it the wrong way, and we only had 24 candles to work with.
EJ blows out his candle on the second day of his birthday.
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