"Can we GO now?"

“Nik, nik, nik, nik. Nik, nik, nik, nik, nik, nik.” This is a sound that Olive hates. It’s the sound of me tapping the keys on my keyboard. Sometimes I tap so fast, that the sound reminds me of a psychotic poodle’s toenails clicking across a just polished marble floor. She hates this sound because it usually means that I am working for hours on end. Hours that she could be spending in the backyard digging holes and eating fistfuls of clay-packed dirt infused with creepy crawlies. Hours that she could be spending chasing birds, rabbits and pheasants across the fecally-fertilized lawn. Hours that she could be outside walking sniffing the naughty bits of strange dogs… and people. Or hours that she could be spending at the dog park with her dog friends racing around the park’s perimeter at 140 miles per hour. Which by the way, she wasn’t too happy about last week when two Greyhounds, the breed that Olive is routinely and embarrassingly mistaken for, outran her. Olive is not used to being outrun at the dog park. She implicitly understands that her speed is her single biggest advantage over most other dogs. When it’s a “Nik Nik,” day, Olive’s day is more sedate and boring. If she’s behaving, I let her have the run of the house and she usually winds up stretched across the back of the living room couch, gazing out the front window, occasionally barking. If she’s already shown any indication of having a moderate case of “ants-in-the-pants-itis,” running around chewing on anything she can find, then I corral her in my office, where she snuggles up in her bed next to my chair waiting for the moment when I turn to her and say, “Who wants to go for a walkie?” She looks at me with the most transparent expression of yearning I have ever seen. As she cocks her head, her pupils dilate and her tail snaps back and forth with such force that her whole body begins to shake. She’s so excited that I’m afraid if I don’t get her out of the house in 30 seconds, she’s going to self-combust. And then the weim fun and games begin. Downstairs, as I go to put her Frankenprong collar on, she runs away from me. Now she wants to play tag and I should run around the house like an idiot chasing her. When I have a micron of patience, I sit down and wait for her to come to me. She takes her time, the stubborn, independent little beeyotch. Other times, I cheat and hold up a tiny treat and she runs toward me as though I were Pavlov. “Sometimes, Olive, you are very predictable.” This dog would turn her colon inside out just to get a treat.