You All Know By Now, I LOVE Dogs...

Yes, I've always loved my dogs, I've never been much of a cat person. I grew up with various different dogs, from the welsh corgie, Penny, that my parents had gotten around the time I was born, to my current dogs, Griffen and Nemo.

Penny used to follow me around on my paper route when I was 8. I'd ride along on my way cool BMX wannabe bike, and Penny would follow along and hang out with me. It was her chance to sniff some other dogs butts, and get some treats from my paper route customers while narrowly missing getting hit by cars.

I used to sneak her into the stationwagon when we'd go for the day to my family's lot on Soapstone Mountain in Ellington, CT. Then when it got too far to turn back, I'd pull her out from under whatever thing was covering her--jacket, blanket, chainsaw--"Look Dad! Penny's here!!" I am not sure my parents always appreciated it when I completely disregarded their "No, Penny is NOT coming, she's staying home" but I like to think that they really did like having her along anyway. Penny died when I was around 10, and that completely bummed out little 10 year old me.

We had a few other dogs, Tiger, Jagger, and all of them had unfortunately short lives with us. That is until we got Sammy. Sammy was an Australian Shepherd, and she was trained to be a show dog but because her teeth were crooked she would not have a career as a show dog. So we ended up with a fully trained 6 month old doggie, for FREE. (Side note, I kept looking at her teeth, and wondered which one was crooked, I'd never been able to determine what was wrong with her teeth. Oh well, that's doggie show business' loss!)

I was 12 when we brought Sammy home. And she was the best dog EVER. I swear she could understand when my parents would command her to do things in Polish. I used to joke that she was a bi-lingual dog. Well, tri-lingual if you count Dog. At least while we had Sammy I did get my drivers license, and didn't have to worry about my parents saying "No, Sammy's staying home."

Today I was cleaning a room in our house, that Todd and I call the stock room. It's a room in our house in which a lot of our junk is quite literally piled to the ceiling. Cleaning, for me, ends up involving finding a box containing photo albums, and sitting there looking through all of them. This is why Todd hates cleaning with me, by the way, because cleaning a room like this will quite literally take days rather than hours. So I was going through an album, and found these pictures of Sammy that I wanted to share with you.


Wasn't she pretty? Getting a bath wasn't her favorite thing in the world.


I don't know if you can tell or not, but Sammy didn't have a tail. Pure Austrailian Shepherds didn't have them. She didn't even have a nub or anything. So she had to resort to smiling instead when she was happy. She was not smiling for this picture, however.

Sammy died when I was 19, while I was in college. The kicker was she died on a Saturday, and I came home to visit on a Sunday. So I missed her by one day and that thoroughly bummed out 19 year old me.

Because I have to, here are pictures of Griffen and Nemo.


I think I am just SO artistic for the way that this picture of Griffen turned out. It was purely accidental. One afternoon Todd stood there throwing 4759562506 frisbees so I could get a shot of Griff catching one. Sadly, after 2 rolls of film, this was the best one. All of the other ones involved him missing it, or poor timing with my shutter finger. There was even one where the frisbee ended up in a tree, and we had to get it down with a rake.



This is my solar powered beagle, Nemo. He charges up in the sun, then runs around the house like a maniac, then passes out in a puddle of sun again. As you can see, he leads a very rough existence, with the bare minimum in dog luxury. In fact, this instant he's dozing in a pile of down comforter.

Every neighborhood has that crazy lady with way too many cats. When I get old, I will probably be that crazy lady with a bunch of dogs. But things could be worse I guess, at least I haven't knitted my dogs matching sweaters. Yet.