Yule’s Mom, the wealthy heiress, is off traipsing around Europe or Asia or somewhere. It’s hard to keep track of her travels. The most excellent part about these trips is that Yule comes here, his second home. Sadly, I only have him for a few more days after which he must return to his primary home.

You mat recall that Yule and Scrappy are best friends. Scrap won’t play with very many dogs. But he’ll play with Yule nearly every day that he’s here. I like to wait out front when I know Yule will arrive soon. I tell Scrappy that Yule is coming and he’ll start looking intently up the road to see if he can spot him.

Yule knows when he is getting close and keeps a lookout through the car window.

It’s been a while, old friend.

Yule loves to race around the yard. Scrappy tries to keep up by running the inside circle but he’s really no match for Yule. Normally I can stay out of Yule’s way but this week he did take me down. I’m 99% sure it was on purpose. I watch him closely and move as necessary. But this time he shifted course just a little bit and lowered his shoulder into my ankle. I went up and down, and have been nursing a sore foot ever since. All in good fun, I guess.

I had a surprise for Yule this trip. I often make Yule meet other dogs — for his own good, you know. Sometimes the dog he meets even lives in the house with us. What Yule didn’t know is that this time there would be TWO dogs in the house in addition to his friend Scrappy. Not only that, one of the dogs was Lilly. The one that visited this epic correction on Yule the last time he was here.

First, Yule got to meet, Walter, a very nice boy that Yule didn’t know at all. The meeting went okay. Not perfect but good enough.

Then we reintroduced Lilly and Yule. It was obvious that Yule remembered Lilly from their previous, uh, tête-à-tête. He was wary. But he overcame his caution and made an effort to be friends with Lilly.

I intended to keep the dogs separated to some extent the first evening but they ended up rushing in the house together. No incidents so I let them be. But I watched them carefully over the next days and defused several incidents. Walter was adopted within a week so it was just Lilly and Yule to keep an eye on. Lilly corrected Yule three times in the first 2 weeks but these were “no contact” corrections to let Yule know he was getting too close at the moment. It’s been a good experience for both of them.