Mutt Monday

In the tradition of some of my favorite blogs, like Dooce.com and MiltonADay.com, I've decided to post a dog blog once a week, called Mutt Mondays. You know. Because sometimes people get sick of reading about vegetables or babies or my thoughts about grass. But everyone likes pictures of cute dogs.

Let's kick off our first Mutt Monday by introducing our own dear doggies, Boston and Hokie.

Boston came to us in late October, 2004. Anyone remember anything interesting in the world of sports from that year? No? Well it just so happened that after 80-some-odd years of not winning the World Series, the Boston Red Sox finally broke their curse. The very next day, while working on a construction site in southern Virginia, Bill saw a hungry little puppy wandering just outside of a pack of stray dogs. The puppy started following him around, and later that night I got a phone call from him after work. "I've done something bad..."

He brought the puppy home. I mean, how could he not. I think when the term "puppy-dog eyes" was coined, the speaker was looking into those. Caught up as we were in the exuberant baseball-y-ness of the night before, we called her Boston and she became our first baby.

We're not sure what her breed mixture is, but we think it's a mix of Rottweiler-German Shephard-New Zealand Sloth-Bulgarian Brick Wall or something like that. She enjoys laying on the floor, laying in the grass, laying in the shade, laying in the sun, laying on your foot, and laying just behind you in the kitchen or anywhere else that you make sudden movements and don't expect a dog to be laying. She is persistent in demanding to be petted. On the occasions that she has gotten out of the yard, she is quite adept at getting lost, distracted, forgetful of where her house is, and in general, a pain to bring home. She is always happy to see her people, though, and despite her bad (selective) memory when it comes to coming home, she never forgets a person and literally cries with joy whenever my mother-in-law comes to visit.

She also, regrettably, LOVES killing small rodents and treating them like stuffed animals. In the winter when the lake near our house recedes from it's shores, we take the dogs and let them run around and hunt. It does a doggie good:


Our second canine baby is a bit younger, and we estimate her birthday to be somewhere around Feb. 2008. When we moved to Oklahoma in May, I decided that we needed to get a companion for Boston since we were no longer all crammed into a one-bedroom apartment. I didn't waste much time in finding the local animal shelter and going to see if any of the puppies called my name. This one did:

We called her Hokie (Bird), an homage to Bill's alma mater, Virginia Tech. We think she is a mixture of Australian Shephard-Labrador Retreiver-Texas Garbage Disposal-SubSaharan Water Buffalo-General Punk. She loves to fetch thrown objects, bark if said objects are not thrown fast enough, work herself into a heat stroke obsessively chasing after thrown objects, scavange the neighborhood for potential objects to be thrown (especially on trash day), steal the Boston's food, steal the cat's food, and join Boston in the general laying around.

She is usually too smart for her own good, and has successfully trained the baby to feed her on demand from his tray. She was quick to learn to stay inside the electric fence we have around our backyard, but after several months decided that slight shocks really weren't that bad, and managed to convince us to remove her buzz collar because she would always return to the yard before we knew she was gone (I think she and Boston have a lookout situation set up somehow). She also excels at soccer. No joke, I can literally play soccer with her for hours.

I think we ought to call the Disney company and get them to cast her in the next live-action-dog-joins-sports-team movie that will inevitably have straight-to-DVD sequels.

So there you have it. The Wat dogs. And just so you don't think they have free reign from the doorknobs down, they both answer to a higher authority:


Their feline overlord is a 10-lb domestic short hair named Stella. But hers is a tale that will be revealed in time, when she is ready for me to tell it.

Happy First Mutt Monday, everyone!