This is why we share our lives with dogs.

It doesn’t matter if the day is cold, gray, and rainy, as it was all of last week. Or if I left Cali home alone for a few hours, which she protests with pouts. Or that I have been very preoccupied with work, and therefore I have spent far too much time staring at a computer screen this week. Cali dances.

Cali is a happy dog.

If a guest comes over, she rushes over to say hi. Then she grabs a toy — the three-legged lamb in this video and her enormous earless pink owl are current favorites — and dances around the living room. (If the visitor is someone she really likes, a concert of overjoyed squealing introduces the dance.)

Cali also does this dance first thing each morning and every time I come home, even if all I did was walk across the parking lot to throw out a bag of trash. She occasionally breaks into spontaneous dance at other times of the day.

When I am on the phone, she might do this dance or her other specialty, which entails lying on her back and bicycling furiously with her back legs to propel herself around the room. The hope is that I will laugh so hard that I have to end the call and pay attention to her. Oddly, it works pretty well. Unfortunately, I have never been able to capture the upside-down bicycle dance on video.

Cali is a happy dog. She shares this joy with all of her friends, by which I mean every human being she has ever met (or walked past) and most dogs that are smaller than she is and who have not tried to steal her tennis ball.

So, rather than spend any more of this unbelievably beautiful fall day inside, staring at a computer, I am going outside with my dancing girl to enjoy the sun. Have a joyous week.