It's nothing short of amazing how quickly Jack and Jill grow their haircoats, looking dishevelled and unkempt, and prodding me to do something about it. They've never been taken to be professionally groomed, and nor were Button and Riley ever groomed by a professional. I simply use a number of various-sized scissors to trim their coats, and a specialized little blunt-nosed scissor to groom the insides of their ears so they don't get plugged.

Jack and Jill, though they're rambunctious little dogs, are fairly well behaved when I settle down to snip their hair. Jill never tries to intercede when I'm cutting Jackie's hair; she simply waits her turn, likely hoping I'll never get around to her. Jack on the other hand, is constantly present when Jillie's hair is being trimmed, to sniff around and lick her and me as well. As long as he isn't too disruptive I pay him little mind, and just allow him to do his gentle prodding.

Invariably, their hair gets cut on a Tuesday. And that's because Tuesdays are leisure days for me, when I don't have to do too much of anything. Mostly meal preparation, and earlier I'd made a large bowl of cole slaw that will accompany the meatballs-and-mushrooms-in-gravey-over-rice that I'm preparing for this cold day's dinner.

When the weather was balmy that haircutting task could be done out-of-doors and the resulting mess of black hair kept to a minimum. I do keep a bag handy to put the snipped hair into, but the area around where the cutting gets done eventually becomes littered with little blobs of hair. I usually rake up the hair once the cutting is completed, and pop it into the bag, then vacuum up the rest.

Of course, I will have vacuumed the house the day before, since Mondays happen to be house-cleaning day. It doesn't make all that much sense, I know, to clean the house assiduously one day and follow up the next day, snipping the hair of two little dogs who will shake all the loose hair that their brush hasn't caught and distribute it all over the house. But that's the way it's done in this house.

There's always the feeling of satisfaction when the job is done. And the pleasure taken in viewing how spiffy they look, afterward. And as it happened, after that was done we all got ready for a ravine walk. We found two little sweaters we'd  bought for them last winter and on they went.  It's a beautiful day, with full sun, but nippy and a light wind. We're not the only ones who considered this a perfect day for a ravine ramble; we came across many acquaintances doing just that.