Morning walk...

Morning walk...  I talked with my mom this morning (it's Mother's Day, you know!), checked the rain gauge (just 0.14" since yesterday morning), then lassoed up the three dogs and headed out for our morning walk.  The photo at right is after the first third of a mile, looking east (and slightly uphill) along the road we take.  The low clouds are completely hiding the Wasatch Mountains that would normally be visible.

The dogs really like these after-rain walks.  You can tell that the smells are intensified for them – they eagerly dash hither and yon, chasing the wisps their noses catch.  Me, I just smell the wet earth from the alfalfa fields we're walking past.

For some reason the dogs were completely disinterested in the earthworms this morning.  Even Race, who ate about a hundred of them a few mornings ago, just completely ignored them.  Weird.  Maybe they weren't too digestible :)

Mo'i (with the green leash) is speed-regulated by the slope of our path.  On the steeper uphill parts, we're walking at a lazy human pace.  On the level bits, we're making a kind of normal human pace.  On the downhill stretches, we're zipping along at a brisk pace.  It feels like I could model his pace in software very easily, by assuming a certain amount of friction, mass, and a little locomotive force.  The other two, were they controlling the pace, would have us at a flat-out run no matter what the slope was.  The model for them would be even easier: a fixed speed!