Pono visits the ocean

Today, we decided to escape the heat, and head for the coast. Pono has never seen the ocean before, and we thought it would be fun to take him to "Dog Beach". We had a few errands to run first, so by the time we got to Dog Beach, it was about 4 pm. The parking lot has meters, and we only had about one hour worth of coins. We put all the coins we had into that meter. Then, we headed down to the sand. There were people and dogs everywhere, but it wasn't overly crowded. Right away, I took off my sandals and headed for the water, with Pono on the leash behind me. He was fine, until he saw the foamy water headed towards him, at which point he leaped into the air and headed up the beach as quickly as he could, dragging me behind him. We walked to a less crowded spot on the beach, so we could let Pono off the leash. It was taking some coaxing on my part to get him in the water. The waves were a little scary!


Fortunately, Matthias had the wisdom to bring a ball. When Pono saw the ball, he forgot all about the terrifying waves. We didn't throw the ball so that he was chasing it into the ocean, but he did manage to get quite wet. We were able to use the ball to lure him in deeper than he would otherwise have gone. Plenty of other dogs came over to us, wanting to play with Pono, but he only had eyes for the ball. Nothing else seemed terribly important. The good thing was that we managed to wear Pono out in the one hour our coins had alloted us.

The water was much warmer than Matthias and I had expected it to be. If we had known it was going to be so warm, we definitely would have brought our suits. (and surfboards!) We both managed to get quite wet. It still felt great.

The only down side to the day happened after we left the beach (fortunately). I think Mr. Pono drank too much ocean water. He got a pretty sick tummy, and had diarrhea when we were walking to the car. He seemed fine after that, so we loaded up, but then about a half hour into the ride home, he threw up. Not good. We had to stop and let him out for some air (and us too!) He did drink water and felt good enough to sleep all the rest of the way home. Hopefully, he will learn not to drink that salt water, because we'd really like to take him back to dog beach again.

There is one other exciting thing I would like to share with you. Earlier this week, I sold two small oil paintings to a designer for the tv show "Las Vegas". Apparently, there is a pretty good chance my paintings will be on television! How cool is that?! If any of you feel like looking for them on the show, these are the two paintings I sold.