Saturday morning Nina picture (with bonus canine content)

The husband and I had a dog for about an hour and a half on Thursday. Not had exactly, but it lived in our house and ate dog food we bought, so it sort of counts. It happened because I saw this Husky running around in the neighbor's yard, no leash, no people nearby, and I thought, well, if it were my Husky, I'd want somebody to try to find me. So the husband and I went out and called the dog, who came right over to us, and walked in the house like this was a totally normal and obvious thing for it to do, and I called the vet clinic phone number on the tag to see if they could tell me who had lost it.

And they kind of knew -- they gave me a name (which wasn't in the phone book), and they gave me a phone number (which didn't work), and they said the owner's address was given as Fairfield, IA, which is a solid two counties away. This dog was way too clean to have been walking through the snow and slush for fifty miles, so locating an owner looked like kind of a dead end.

So it looked like maybe he (oh yeah -- the vet's office also said it was a he; there's lots of fur on a Husky, so this wasn't immediately obvious) was going to be here for a while. The husband set some water out for him, and went to the grocery store for food, and I just followed the dog around the house as he sniffed everything, repeatedly, partly because it was really novel to have a dog in the house and partly because I wanted to make sure he didn't try to chew any of the plants. And then I tried getting some pictures so I could make a FOUND DOG sign to put up. This was the best one --


And the thing you have to know here for this story to make sense is, we've been talking about getting a dog for a long time. Since well before we moved into the house last May. Since before we'd even started looking for houses. And we were actually looking for a dog that was about this size (thinking more of a German Shepherd, but whatever, the Husky was already trained well enough to know "no" and "sit," at least, so he was probably housebroken already too, which is a huge plus). So I was kind of hoping we wouldn't be able to locate an owner, and I'd already started blogging about him in my head, how he, like Nina, had just shown up and been taken in, and it was all going to be very heartwarming. You'd have laughed, you'd have cried, you'd have learned the true meaning of St. Patrick's Day.

But.

Asked the neighbors, when they got home, if they had any idea who in the neighborhood had any Huskies, particularly any Huskies that might be interested in investigating their yard, and, long story short, they did know somebody close by who had recently moved up here from Fairfield to live with family, and who had a Husky, so the neighbors went to ask them if they had a dog missing, and of course they had, and so then within a few minutes our dog was running over to his actual owners, who were repeatedly grateful, and that was the end of the whole thing, it would appear.

Now. We can hope that the dog remembers that if he runs away from home and comes to us, we'll give him tons of attention and feed him and play with him and pet him and all kinds of fun stuff, and maybe he'll just keep running away and coming to us until the real owners throw up their hands in exasperation and say fine, he's your dog, he obviously likes you better, we don't want him anymore, but this is probably unrealistic.

So there's a pretty good chance that you're going to see a brand-new dog show up on the blog here sometime in the next couple months. Just 'cause . . . you know.

I mean, we have all this dog food already, and it'd be so wasteful to throw it out.

I mean, maybe not. But we're at least probably going to be looking harder. To date, we've only gone to the animal shelter once. But that might be happening quite a lot more for a while.