A girl, her friend's dog, and their misadventures in the world, intro

Don’t know how many of you knew this, but for nine days (I’d say “the past nine days” but I’m a couple days late in writing this) I learned so many things about taking care of an active, two-year-old, big dog. In this case it was a black lab. A rather large black lab, actually. And for those nine days it was a battle of authority. Thankfully, I had gotten many chances to observe how Anthony handles his dog, otherwise, I don’t know if I would’ve handled it so well, or if I’d have been run off because I didn’t know what to do. The biggest challenge was teaching Ned that jumping on and grabbing me wasn’t an acceptable way to tell me he wanted to go on a walk. The second adventure was getting him to recognize me as the authority, so when I said, “off!” it meant “Off!” and when I said, “Give!” I meant, “Give!” etc. The third was keeping up with him on runs. He wanted to go out every day, but on a couple occasions I didn’t take him on a run because I wanted him to know it wasn’t a given that we were going on a walk/run, and attacking me wasn’t going to help. I learned to smack, wrestle, shove, cage, spray, and tackle Ned. Thank God that he finally started acknowledging my authority. Hehe, at first it was more of, “Ok, I’ll humor you this time.” Eventually I noticed that he didn’t completely take me seriously. I would shove him off of me and tell him, “Off!” and he’d jump right back up and kind of nip at my hand when I shoved at him again. By the end of the week, though, he would get off, give, and everything when I told him to! 20 bruises and about twice as many scratches later, we have respect. Maybe he even likes me some. I’m hoping to keep running with Ned a couple times a week. Maybe I’ll get a chance to talk to Mr. and Mrs. Lorenzini about it tomorrow. We’ll see. But running along behind or beside Ned, it made running really fun. I’ve never had fun just running before, but it’s a lot of fun with such and energetic companion. *laughs* That dog would’ve taken off if it hadn’t been for his lead being wrapped around my wrist. Hehe, he practically took off anyway. He was so excited to get out, no matter how long or not long we were out, he always had this satisfied way of walking back. He always wanted to run going, and hardly wanted to run at all on the way back, even if we were only going for 10 minutes. If I’d have thought of this sooner I could’ve told you more about the adventures we went on, the places we explored (not that Ned’s never explored most of those places before, but…). Course, I suppose most of you don’t care that much. But it was exciting. And now I'd really love a big dog that'll go on runs with me, and play with me, even though I'm sure I won't be as rough as Ani is with his dog. And I hope to get a husky, but we'll see where God leads that wish :-).