Jean’s Place closes at 2 p.m. on Wednesdays, and I often have lunch there that day. I risk my life if I don’t bring Zinnia, and I usually wait until after two when there is hardly anyone there.

Then, I get her out of the car and bring her inside. She greets all of her pals (below) and then I do some training. I walk her to the end of the diner and tell her to stay and then walk back to towards the kitchen and wait a minute or so

Then I say “free!” in a loud and clear voice. She comes running.

Zinnia is at home in many places, she is the canine Queen Of Entitlement, a Wasp Princess. Someone blasted me on my blog the other day because I wrote about some loving and ratty rescue dogs that walk with us in the woods.

She said I was offensive, I suggested she find a higher quality blog to read. I did add that I did not become a writer so humorless strangers on the Internet could show me how to write.

I am loving training Zinnia and discovering how comfortable a socialized dog can be in so many different spaces.

P.S. Some software vomited this morning and sent out many hundreds of messages saying people had or hadn’t renewed their subscriptions. It was a glitch, a spewing of backlogged alerts. These messages flooded my computer in the middle of the night when I was obsessing on a good British mystery series and it freaked me out, I thought I was under attack.

Please ignore it, just another example of how easy computers are making our lives. They’re just old messages the software forgot to send some time ago.