Readers! You’ve outdone yourselves again with your pictures and stories and willingness to share your love of your four-legged family members with us. We always marvel in this space about how much people let down their guard and offer glimpses into their hearts when they talk about their dogs (and cats).
And this year it was no different. We noticed something else noteworthy this year. When we solicited dog and cat pics, we ask folks to provide pet names, names of the humans and hometowns, etc.
Some pet pics arrive with the requisite information and others don’t which requires us to send a follow-up email seeking those details. In the year 2025, let’s consider the speed of email responses in regular daily life. Some occur within the hour, some within 24 hours, some in a few hours and some more quickly.
When the question is a detail needed to get your pets’ pics in the paper, we can report that the response time is between instantaneous to a few minutes and maybe an hour at the outside. Nothing says “this is important to me” than those email response times.
It’s been a good dog year here with the Mad River Dog Park fully open and online and becoming a central location for canine play and human interactions. Dogs make everything fun – in particular a New Year’s Eve party this writer was lucky enough to attend last week.
Upon arrival, a house guest of the hosts had her black lab-ish mix dog with a cute beard and another guest had brought his three-year-old golden with all the enthusiasm that carries. Walking in we met another guest who was running home to get her dogs to bring them to the party. The next thing we knew there were the lab-mix, the golden and two Bernese Mountain dogs in a smallish condo in Sugarbush Village.
What a way to ring in the New Year. Had we not lived so far away we might have gone to get at least one of our three dogs to join the party.
