Puppy Love

All those who have ever had a conversation of more than 5 minutes with me will have discovered my near-unhealthy level of obsession with my dogs.  Here they are:

The one on the left is Roxy, who is never called Roxy.  She's The Pickle.  She's a Pembroke Welsh Corgi.  She's a midget.  No really, like in a full on Munchkinland kind of way.  Corgis have these short stumpy little legs that often look more like flippers than feet.  The Pickle is everyone's best friend, including yours.  Did you know?

The red and white dog on the right is Gus.  Also referred to as Gus-Gus, The Dude and the Retread.  I will explain how exactly he is retreaded later.  Gus is a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel supposedly, but he doesn't act like one and although he has the correct bone structure, markings, DNA, etc... he sure doesn't even look much like my friends' cavvies.

   Pickle is our family supervisor.  We are not allowed to do anything without Pickle's help and supervision.  She's friendly, earnest, smart and absurdly patient with the kid.  Very good dog.  Her negative personality traits include being overly talkative for someone who refuses to learn English along with a deep desire to herd things which she is actually pretty terrible at, and results in her pretty much being underneath your feet no matter where you're trying to put them.

    Gus is a lemon.  There's no other way to put it.  Cavaliers are supposed to be intelligent, friendly little fearless bundles of social skills.  Gus is afraid of cellophane. The only two things on earth that are not threatening to Gus are me and the husband.  All the rest of the world is secretly a Dr. Evil plot to kill or maim him.  Seriously, it took him 3 months to learn to use the doggie door because TODAY might have been the day when we added the guillotine attachment to behead him if he dared to poke his little black nosey out of it.  He's simply not very smart.  In fact we joke that he's so very un-gifted that he's retreaded because he would fall below retarded on the spectrum and probably couldn't spell it anyway.   But on the plus side, he desperately loves his Mommy. In fact, I believe his life's dream is to wake up one moring having morphed into a parasite that could live inside of me, or perhaps to be surgically grafted to me somehow.  His most common emotion seems to be suspicion.

 However defective my dogs may be, I wouldn't trade them for much. Growing up my family had a little terrier named Muttley who didn't particularly like me.  She didn't dislike me, but I just wasn't particularly intresting to her.  So Gus is the first dog who has ever been unquestionably, unequivocally mine.  And being loved that much by a little doofy looking creature will inflate an ego faster than anything else I know. Pickle belongs to whoever is paying attention to her.  Including The Squirt, with whom Pickle has enviable patience.  The Squirt is occasionally stricken with Doggie Mania, wherin she MUST manhandle a dog.  Well, that would send Gus straight to the grisly jaws of death, so Pickle almost always takes one for the team.  Her ears are pulled, her eyes poked, her legs grabbed, even occasionally her nose is picked or her teeth examined and she just takes it as it comes, never growling or snapping and only rarely even running away.

   Now, my dogs aren't all sunshine and roses.  Both of them tend to forget that they're housebroken, especially in the event of a precipitation event.  They LOVE to bark at cats.  They believe that the fridge being opened means they're entitled to a Cheese Tithe. They surround me in bed at night, forcing me to sleep in some sort of pretzel contortionist position that makes my chiropractor a lot of money.  They REALLY like to roll on the dead things that Pepper the Ninja Cat of Death murders and brings home for us.  They like to eat only the chewy bits of artificiality in their dog food, but insist on being fed a fairly steady stream of french fries and pizza crust.  But they snuggle with me on the sofa in the winter and we make a big warm pile of person and dog fur.

   So if you don't have a dog you should get one.  But you can't have mine.