Sophia thinks it's hot

After an unusually snowy winter and a rainy spring, Sophia has a problem adjusting to the warm weather. No longer interested in her big wicker basket, she wanders around with a grim expression, looking for a cool spot, as if she were trying to escape from a heat wave.

Often, she decides that it's preferable to stay inside the house, which is generally fairly cool.

I've never understood what it is that attracts her regularly to that spot under the stairs. Then there is, of course, the dust bowl she recently scooped out for herself in a northern corner of the house.

A great advantage here is that the rim of the hole makes a nice firm pillow, softened by the presence of a paw, for a heavy drowsy head.

ANECDOTE: There are two amusing images that I've never yet succeeded in capturing on my Nikon. The first is that of my dog upright in the driver's seat of my Citroën, with her snout up against the steering wheel. Sophia gets into this lookout position as soon as I leave her on a parking lot. She scrutinizes every approaching human, awaiting my return. As soon as she spies me, even at a distance of a hundred meters, Sophia scrambles back down onto the floor. She surely recalls old incidents about the Master (that's me) getting upset when he found his dog lying on a sofa or a bed. So, to avoid a conflict, she considers that it's preferable to abandon the driver's seat immediately, before the Master gets back into the vicinity of the automobile. And I'm left with the task of using a brush to remove dog hairs from the driver's seat. The other difficult-to-obtain image is that of the donkeys stretched out on the ground at Gamone, or sitting upright on their rumps. Insofar as it takes them a few seconds and a lot of effort to get back up onto their hoofs, the recumbent position would have been dangerous for a donkey back in Africa, eons ago, when they would have been great fodder for rapid predators such as lions. So, surviving donkeys have a gene that instructs them to get back up onto their legs rapidly, as soon as they spot a large intruder… such as me and my Nikon. One of these days, I must remember to obtain both these images with a telephoto lens.