How she came to be mine...

So, I was thinking that I never explained how exactly she came to be my puppy. So, here goes nothing! I think I should start on the back story of my last dog first. Senior year in high school, I went to Ikea because my mom said if I designed my room, we could do it, so off I went with measuring tape in hand. As I was leaving I saw this scraggly mangy dog running towards the freeway. There is no way I could let him go get run over so I turned around and headed into the Dulux paint store's parking lot. Sure enough this muddy messy dog did the you come to me I go away, you go away I follow tango for about an hour before this nice couple came and gave me a bag of treats and explained they had been trying to rescue him for a few months. So I threw him a treat. He scarfed it down. I threw one closer, he came and scarfed that one down too. I continued the closer, treat, closer, treat thing until I put a treat in my backseat. He was so hungry he just couldn't resist trying to get it. So with both back doors open, he timidly tried to get the treat with as much body outside the car as possible. That is when I grabbed his collar and he just hunkered down on the ground like I was going to beat the living daylights out of him. He was so scared I had to pick up his approx. 50 lb body and set it into the car. Once the doors were shut and I was inside he perked up and let me pet his chest and ears. I took him home, and he was my Shep. I spent the next week brushing out his coat as he lay in my lap and generally making sure he knew he was in a good place with regular food and love. It took him a while to learn to trust anyone but me. He was always perfect with other dogs, but large men (well adult men) were always kind of scary to him. It seems like he was beaten and abused pretty badly before me. About four years after I'd had him, somehow our derelict backyard fence didn't close and he got out. Some awful man beat him with a baseball bat and let his dogs bite him. My mom ran out to him screaming in pain and had to carry him inside. The jerk had broken his leg, broken his teeth (required a root canal and an extraction) and had ruined all trust he'd built. We took him to a training class with Houston's version of the Dog Whisperer who said he was kind of a bully but wouldn't be a threat. He said he could be rehabilitated and not be any sort of threat to people, but one day he freaked out about a year and a half after the incident and bit my brother's hand with no provocation and broke open skin. Don't get me wrong. I love my Shep, but I cannot have a dog who would be aggressive towards a family member he had known and played with for about 5 years. What if it was someone's small child who got too close? So I had to make the hard decision to put him down.

Fast forward about a year and a half later and I was finally ready to bring another canine into my life. After having to let go of him, I wanted a puppy so young it could either not have been abused (and would therefore only know my loving home) or so young that it would not remember or keep hold of anything any awful person could have done. I was ready for the poop and the pee and the feedings and not going out. I searched for a long time on petfinder. (I don't believe in getting a pet shop pet for the obvious reasons, and I cannot justify getting a proper breeder dog when there are so many who die every year/month/day because someone didn't spay or neuter) FINALLY, New Year's Eve morning, I was searching around and I found a pictureless listing titled 5 Aussie Pups. They were all the way in Apple Valley/Lucerne Valley. For those who don't know, that is half-way to Vegas from LA, so about 2-3 hours drive. Something just felt right. Like one would be the puppy meant for me. I called the lady at Helping Paws and she said I could come that day. She mentioned there were 5 of them and 4 Aussie/Border Collie mixes from the same dad. (Who could not spay/neuter their three dogs, then not want the 9 beautiful pups born within 2 days of each other? You don't want puppies, fix your pets.) As we are almost reaching our destination, the lady asks us to go hang out for a minute as she has an extremely sick puppy who needs medical attention. So Angel and I hang out at Target for about an hour and call her again. Within 5-10 minutes of being back on the road, she calls and asks us to come pick her up as her truck just broke down. So, we pick her up and continue on. Along the way we cross what she calls Dead Man's Curve as apparently a lot of people used to die there when it was all proper desert, and so many bumpy dirt roads I can feel my brain rattling. We finally arrive at her home, which doubles as the rescue and she brings out the first puppy. She is a tiny 2lb furball of gray black and white. I am in love. We see the rest of the pups, but my heart stays with the tiny merle. It is so cold outside I have tucked her into my jacket to keep her warm. I almost, and very nearly almost, took home another of her littermates, and probably should have, but I got my dream puppy. She was the best $150 I have ever spent and is worth so much more to me. She has been worth the sleep loss of feeding her every 6 hours and the bunches of times I cleaned/mopped/sanitized the floor before she was house trained and the nights of staying in/missing out on stuff because she's like a kid and needs taking care of. She's not man's best friend, she's my best friend and co-pilot.