Something old and something new.

During our on again, off again Arctic Winter this past week I mentioned in one of my posts about Ruff and Axl at one time a few years ago running across the frozen pool in our backyard. I went back on this blog today to find the pictures and discovered only one of them had been published on February 20, 2010 in Scenes of Winter with our Rottweilers. I had several pictures of them doing this when Axl was still young enough and spry enough to run around with his new best friend. That blue thing in the photo is the diving board which I now remove when I close the pool. Back then the pool was closed up using a solid cover on top of the water to catch the snow melt and rain and the safety cover was laid on top. The safety cover is made with thick bands of material attached to anchors in the concrete sidewalk around the pool but in between the bands is a mesh fabric that can no longer hold the weight of the dogs on it so now I place the solid plastic cover over it which sags with the rain water. This is why the Rottweilers can no longer run across it even if the water below is solid ice.

So here is the best of the bunch along with a few new ones taken today. I just love to watch them run around and play with each other. They always did this in the larger back yard when we went for our walks. These two became best friends from the first day we brought Axl to his forever home. Sassy would not approve of this kind of play.

From February 20, 2010

In all of the past photos of Axl and Ruff running around, before age started to catch up to him, Axl was always the fastest and Ruff could never catch him. But when they jumped on each other in play it also seemed that Axl was teaching Ruffin that he was the older, more senior Rottweiler and Ruff had to learn to respect him. In the third photo down that's Axl on top of Ruff.

And here are two pictures of Ruff taken today with the telephoto lens from the kitchen window. While the snow still seems to be about 4-5 inches deep in other places, it seems to be less than an inch deep in the back. Those little round brown objects are the dried up sticky balls from the Gum tree.