What did Zeke do on is vacation this year? He played with his doggelgangers: Booda and Happy. Booda is the large fella on the left, Happy the slightly smaller one in the center. The goal was to align the dogs from big, bigger, to biggest in an identical pose to show how similar they are.

Zeke wasn't having any of that.

Ah, here's Izzy again. Izzy is short (as if anything about the dog wasn't short) for Isabelle. She's, how can we say it, challenged in a number of ways. The first night Izzy and family arrived she ran away. They looked for her, but deep inside there were those little voices, "Maybe she has been taken far, far away..."

The next morning some folks camping down the creek stopped by to ask if we'd lost a dog. Izzy showed up at their RV around midnight, soiled and stinking with pond muck. They gave her a bath, fed her, and then Izzy slept on a corner of their bed.

I restrained from asking if they wouldn't prefer to keep her.

Happy is the latest member of the dog clan Halstead. Mom got her from the local equivalent of the humane society. Happy used to be called "Pitiful Pearl" of all things. She's wound like a hundred year clock and is just as liable to spring a couple feet vertically as she is to charge off after the nearest squeaky thing.

Unlike Zeke and Booda she has perky ears, or rather, ear. The left ear is losing out to gravity and only the biggest of surprises will send it skyward.

And then there is Zeke. He's getting older and creakier but the ramifications of this hasn't made it past his play synapses. The back leg he hurt last year still stiffens up after too much activity yet with so many other dogs vying for attention (and tennis balls) he's isn't about to slow down. Zeke's advanced age (around 13?) has the benefit of some deeper dog wisdom. Unlike Happy and Booda, Zeke no longer tears off across sage dotted hillsides in pursuit of distant antelope and deer.

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