Would you buy the excuse that at my fancy! New! Desk! The chair sits at a weird angle, thereby preventing ergonomic operation of the laptop? This might as well be a desktop, as I have three (!) external hard drives plugged into it, which- you guessed it- makes the thing impossible to unplug and set down in my lap.
Lap. Top.
Wtf.
Operation Name My Dog has been aborted. There was a Name revolt. The Dog’s name is Bella, final answer.
Can I just piss off the dog owners in the audience here for a moment and inform the Internet that I have the only Jack Russell on the planet that sleeps in? I confess that I spent zero seconds in consideration of a Dog’s sleeping habits when I campaigned to bring Bella home, and that I conveniently forgot how my sister in law’s dogs wake her up at 5:30 a.m. to eat and go out, and also I blocked from my mind how every jack Russell I’ve ever seen was wired like my three year old on every Candy Holiday (hi, Easter, and fuck you!).
But not this dog. The universe has smiled upon me, my friends. I am in possession of a dog that, at bedtime, happily retreats to her crate and sleeps there quietly until at least 9 a.m. and some days much later.
I call her “your dog” when worming my way out of evening walks and bathtime. (as in “you need to take your dog outside) And ToddlerA thinks the dog belongs to her, of course and exercises what I hope are normal power plays with the dog who is smaller than her and relatively obedient.
But I think everyone in the house knows the dog belongs to me. I’m not sure whether she realizes that I’m the one who sprung her or if I have some kind of special Dog Pheromone (the last dog we had, Sasha, behaved exactly the same way) or if it’s much more simple than that and just relates to who gives her the most treats and who comes home from every single trip to Target with dog bones. For whatever reason, I’m her person and I find myself itching to run outside with her, rushing through the dishes and walking past my beloved internet so that we can spend some time running in the yard.
I’m not sure I’ve ever written about my last dog Molly, who died when she was 9 months old. I was there, I saw her die, and I was devastated for years. (This happened in 1999) I had nightmares about her, then happier dreams, and finally less and less pain when I look at her pictures. However I’ve since refused to get another dog. My heart was that broken.
When Sasha came to us a few years ago (she was my grandfather’s dog, and she was allergic to our house. Now she lives with my mom) she immediately latched onto me and was so attached that she could not be in a different room. In the end when she went to live on the farm (really.) we often would catch a glimpse of her moping outside the sliding glass door, having run away as soon as my mom looked in the other direction. Eventually my mother won her over with home cooked dog food and strong containment when they weren’t home and now Sasha doesn’t even know who I am.
I never got attached to her, probably in part because I was so gun-shy and in part because she was so fucking annoying, scratching round the clock and eating the trash whenever we left the house, to punish me for going out of her sight. I wanted to love her because she was my grandfather’s dog. But I just didn’t.
There’s something different about Bella. I may finally be ready to love a dog again, folks.
If we are allergic to her I will shoot myself.