Monday, August 3, 2009

Welcome to VA, Spokane.

Last Thursday, at about 10:30 am, I receive a text from my lovely wife Michelle. In said text is a picture of a 6 month old puppy named Apache. She is a Australian shepherd/border collie mix. "Can we adopt her?" follows. My initial response was "Are you crazy?" However, after thinking about it for the rest of the day, I realized that Michelle wouldn't have asked if she didn't really want this dog. I sent a reply later that said if she really wanted her, she could bring her home.

So, Friday night around 10:45 pm, the newly re-named Spokane came out of the special baggage claim and into our lives (well, my life, she had been in Michelle's for the past couple days). Spokane is a good puppy, she just needs a bit of training. Living on a reservation, she didn't have a lot of training. She knows to signal that she wants to go out for the bathroom and we are trying to teach her how to sit. We have to get her comfortable in the house and around our 3 cats who after 2 days of living with a new sister are doing well. They are a bit apprehensive, but so far, not bad.

We have just under 3 weeks until Michelle begins year number 3 of Vet School. In that time we need to get Spokane trained to obey most standard commands. If we are unsuccessful, I am not sure that we can keep her. There won't be much time to train her after that point...luckily, there was another girl on Michelle's RAVS trip that would like to take her if we cannot. I think we can, but we will need to work at it. Hard.

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