So we got snow - 6 inches. So it turned to warmish rain the next day, which turned everything to slusho, varying from liquidy slusho across part of the yard to snowy slusho everywhere else. Then it got cold. I mean cold - single digits rising all the way to teens on the odd afternoon. So the world here is fairly dry, clear streets (thank plow/salting) but ground that is like an untended skating rink everywhere else.
Having a bad knee at the moment is not helping.
So the dogs, all 300+ pounds of them, go out on long lines to do their bidness. Bidness is good. Bidness is well-sculpted mounds of Dane poop that within a few hours are lovely, rock-hard festoons bonded to the crappy skating ring surface (pun accidental).
Their lines get caught on these bollards of bolus, and at first I thought they were just being wimps for not pulling through when it snagged. I mean, we’re talking dogs that could pull a mobile home off its stands and down the street, and they’re whimpering and whining, hung up five feet from the porch steps, by an inch-high projection of frozen poo.
So I crab my way carefully down the steps (bad knee, remember) and use a hooky thingy to grab the line, and tug. Then brace and tug. Then anchor my notable mass and yank hard… and most of the time that will break the frozen poop-snag. The dog is so happy s/he goes bounding in, whipping the line past me and forcing emergency evasion maneuvers (on the bad knee, which has already been subjected to a few badderizing slips).
Poop snags. Not a phrase I thought I’d ever type.