Dogs.

So my dog Razzle died. She was bit by a snake. It was awful.

We will miss you, little girl.

 So much for going quietly in her sleep.

Well, Holly's coping methods are kinda limited, so I went out and got another dog.

Meet Jack.

The pumpkin king?

I swear if anything happens to this dog I am going to stand outside and pump rounds at the sky to get back at the cold uncaring universe. Asshole random events.*

We basically went back to the same lady we got Razzle from and picked out another dog. She also remembered Razzle and expressed her sympathizes. Which was somehow both touching and also the most sad thing ever.

We decided that we wanted a dog about Razzle's size so that we could use the crate and carrier we already had.

What? I'm being practical people.

So we wandered around the kennels looking at dogs. There was the normal hyper but none to bright dogs, the attention whores and the laziest dog I have ever seen. It was a fat yellow beagle lab mix that went to sleep while we were looking at it. We looked at all the dogs in the size that we wanted.

Jack stood out because she described him as lazy. He liked to get up, run for about a minute, and then he was done. Perfect. Also, he was the just the right size.

When we said we wanted to see him the dog lady went in to get him. He acted extremely confused.

“What? Me? The lead? Go OUTSIDE? What? Really?”

Even the other dog that was with him seemed confused. After pulling him out with her she explained that Jack had been there for two years and that nobody ever asked to see him.

Which pretty much meant I had to adopt him on the spot.

Apparently, he had been adopted by one family briefly but they had returned him because the father had wanted a dog to go jogging with him, and Jack does not jog. He had reported that Jack would get about halfway along the route and then want to go home and lay around on the floor.

Hey I like sitting on my ass too! It's like it was meant to be.

It also turns out that he had been there so long that he was free.

So we filled out the paper work and took him home.

I have to state here that many people have said 'remember your new dog won't be Razzle.” And I can tell you straight up that he is not Razzle. Because he spent the whole car trip back sitting calmly on the seat. (we didn't bring the carrier although we had our doggy seat belt rig in.) He didn't try to get in the front seat, he didn't throw up, he didn't try to shove his nose out the window. If I hadn't been looking back periodically to check on him I never would have known there was a dog there at all.

He also walks on the lead correctly. Hey, I can walk the dog without it trying to pull my arm out of my socket! That's wonderful.

However, unlike Razzle, Jack appears to spending his first weeks with us by being terrified of everything. Scott gave him a bath when we got home, and now he treats Scott like he is a demon from the ancient world that has come to sacrifice him on the terrible alter of “Bath.”

He slinks around the house, trying to fit himself into small safe places. He even crawled under the bed. Hell, the cat had problems getting under the bed.

I'll be sitting in the kitchen and I'll see a head slowly creeping around the corner. I say “Hi jack watcha doin?” Head disappears. Head reappears a moment later. Repeat until I leave the kitchen. I'm still disciplining him, as it appears he has had almost no training whatsoever although it does appear that he is housebroken. If I ask him to sit I get a blank look. If I ask him to lay down I get an even blanker look.

I can almost here the wind sailing between his ears.

He's not Razzle. He's Jack.

But I needed something to plug the terrible gaping dog shaped hole in my life.

So I just plugged another dog in my life.

Seems to be working.**

Aww.

*Being an atheist really limits my ability to blame everything on God/Satan.

** My logic is that I won't see the half full food dish as oh my god Razzle is dead and she is never going to eat that food again *sob* and instead I look at it and go, oh it's Jack's dish, that's okay then.