Archive for July 29, 2009

It’s A Dog’s Life – Mine, At Least For Now

by John Weckerle

Our readers may have noticed a brief hiatus since last Saturday.  On that sunny and hot day, we chose to visit what we thought was a food festival at the Triangle Grocery – but which turned out to be a small arts and crafts fair.  We understand that there was some food inside – but we never really got the chance to sample the food or look over the arts and crafts.  My wife spotted the Animal Humane folks at the east edge of the parking lot, and suggested that we stop there first.  We’ve been talking about getting a dog for about a year, and nearly adopted one a couple of months ago (at the last minute, the current owners decided to keep her).  We looked over the occupants of the big RV in which they transport the dogs, and visited with one or two outside before hunger overcame the other folks in the group, and we needed to pop over to the Greenside Cafe for lunch (I had the Funky, a vegetarian sandwich that changes periodically – this time, an excellent portabella mushroom sandwich).  As we started in that direction, my wife noticed a puppy that we hadn’t seen.  He was an eight-week-old Chihuahua/heeler cross and very friendly, so we discussed it over lunch, went back, and adopted him.

We hadn’t really been planning on adopting a puppy, but we are having a great deal of fun.  Even the house training is kind of an adventure – each success is pretty rewarding for everybody involved.  It is, however, time consuming, and has taken up a little of the time I usually set aside for writing.  He’ll be house trained soon, and the articles will increase in frequency.

One disappointment – I called the Town of Edgewood, and found that they have discontinued their dog training classes.  We’ll be checking with Animal Humane to see what they have available; alternatively, I suppose we could enroll in Petsmart’s classes.  If any of our readers know of something of good quality available locally, we’d love to hear about it.