The Story of kryssi and the dog.

So, I have never had a dog that is mine.

We had a dog as a family, a little dog my friend said looked like Toto with shaved legs. His name was Bimbo. But he was not my dog. He was largely my mom's dog, and in his later years he took to peeing in the dining room which reeked so badly you couldn't even be in there without feeling like your pores were burning with urine.

In Texas we had a dog. Mecklenberg was a border collie stray that Jim brought home from work. Again, Not My Dog. Jim took him to the Dumb Friend's League about a year after Genoa was born. He was used to herding cats, and when Genoa would not herd he would knock her over with his big dumb skull. We put him outside, but he sailed over the six foot fence and went gallumphing all over the neighborhood. It broke my heart, but we didn't have the time or resources to retrain him with a baby.

When the girls were about four and five, we ended up with Sundown. His full Christian name was Sundown Macaroni. He was a full black lab with papers, whose need to be social got him booted from his home in Conifer. He was not an animal that could be left outside alone.  The first month we had him, the police were at our house three times because he would sit in the house and cry when we were gone. If we put him outside, he cried. Apparently we had a neighbor who was home all day and was annoyed. We had to go to court and pay a fine because we couldn't stay home with the dog all day. Eventually, he mellowed out and we discovered he liked being crated. It was like his little den. We had him for 13 years, through losing the cartilage in his back leg from a car accident, to blowing out what remained of his tendons on a walk, through seizures and cataracts, he was a tank. He made it through it all, only to die peacefully in his sleep on the floor at the foot of the bed. We had to haul him out, wrapped in a tarp, literally removing a body from our house down our front steps in the middle of the day. Nobody called the police.

A year before Sundown died, Harp decided she wanted a dog for her 18th birthday. So we went to the shelter, and after a debacle with a pit bull mix who tried to eat her clothes, she saw a little black pug thing. He had not been at the shelter the day before, because he was still in the infirmary. He had done something---God Knows What---to pop out his eyeball. They had to put it back in and make sure he was OK before putting him up for adoption. He is clearly part pug, but his nose is too long and his legs are too long. He can jump four feet straight into the air from a seated position. He is a small dog, and so therefore suffers from the small dog licking disorder.

Then Harper moved out with her boyfriend, started massage therapy school and did not take her dumb dog with her. So now I have this dog. That jumps and licks. And I had to have dewormed and who looks like Satan with his pug eyes and not pug nose and freakishly long, spindley legs. And I have to take him for walks, and give him a bath. He can't be outside because our fence is such a wreck, no matter how we try to ghetto rig it, the wind will blow or the hail will pound and it will lodge open just enough for Dumb Ass to escape. If I put him out and leave, he will escape and come looking for me. Even if Jim is home, he will get out--some how---and try to find me. He is not my dog. Why is this happening?

So now I'm stuck. I have to find the money to fix the fence so Not My Dog doesn't get hit by a car, which will upset Harper who doesn't even live here.