The New Deal

I take Nikita for A Very Long Walk several times a day, because a tired puppy is a well-behaved puppy.  Our usual loop is a circumambulation of "the Fens," the big park we now live on.  

We start by taking the elevator down the couple flights -- N doesn't like steps much but does like to give the inside of the elevator door a good lick (?) -- and hang a left down Park Drive.  

We pass the rose garden; the memorials to those Bostonians who died in WWII, Korea, and Vietnam; the Victory Gardens (my application for a plot is in); and curve around Boylston Street, getting nice views of the big dome of MIT across the Harvard Bridge and of the start of swanky Back Bay on our side of the Charles.  

We then skirt the edge of Northeastern University -- mascot: Huskies, so Nikita gets lots of appreciative calls (even though she's a *Malamute* not a Husky but anyway).  Then it's the Isabella Stewart Gardener Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, its School, Simmons College, and Emmanuel College, before looping around the opposite end of the Fens and heading home.  

Along the way, I try to keep N away from the huge gaggle of Canadian geese that live in the park, in part because she tries to eat their poop, in part because some of them seem pretty aggressive, staring at us and making odd hissing noises.  (My neighbor's dachshund was attacked by one: apparently flipped onto his back, straddled, and beaten repeatedly by the thing's wings while being pecked in the face by its mouth/beak/whatever.  Nice.)  

Adding in time for sniffing things; picking up and dropping sticks, branches, logs, empty coffee cups and soda bottles; and saying "hi" to any friendly dog that crosses our path, this takes us about an hour.  If she's not dropping from exhaustion, I then bowl a tennis ball down the length of our hall (~75 feet) and she retrieves it until she really is exhausted.  We then go in, she passes out, and I get to do whatever I need to without having to worry about what she's up to.