Walking the Dog

No, not that type of woking. The sort that results in the type of doggie bags that tend to get tossed directly in the trash... As you can imagine, we've been walking BelAir a ton since we got her. A city dogs life is a lavish affair where your owner is forced to take you out for 4-5 walks a day, so you can exercise, relieve yourself, and terrorize pigeons. Rachel and I have become quite well acquainted with all the "deuce" spots in a 6 block radius, and Bell has charted an internal map of all dog parks, dog day cares, and dry cleaners that give out treats (all very good things) as well as all automatic doors and scary dogs houses (bad things that require us to cross the street to proceed).



On this particular walk, Rachel and I went to marvel and document perhaps my greatest parallel parking job ever. It required only two bumps of the cars before and after me (which I believe are officially fair game in the philly parking scene). I had an equally impressive parking spot earlier in the month that I forgot to document.

Since we had the camera, we decided to take pictures of each other by this small and peculiar monument that sits at the end of Clinton street, probably one of the more beautiful lazy alleys in our new neighborhood. The plaque says "A merciful man is merciful to his beast." It must have been put up by an animal lover, I wish I knew more about it, but whenever I walk the pup by there I notice it and call her a beast. We have fun.

Probably the most cute/annoying thing that Bella does on our frequent walks is to go up the steps of a brownstone walkup. At first we didn't know why she was doing this and suspected that she may have lived in one. Our new theory is that these are the walkups of houses that have dogs, and shes going in for a closer smell.

You might think, "Oh, that doesn't sound too bad," and you are right. But as you can see our hood is packed to the gills with these walkups and its not unheard of for her to need to go up 3-4 per block if she is particularly curious that day.