Tennessee and That Guy

Don't be that guy. I try to live my life my that motto. Don't be the guy on his phone in the grocery store checkout line or at Starbucks. Don't be the guy who orders a hamburger in a high-end restaurant. Don't be the guy that blogs about his dog. Nobody likes that guy.

I am that guy.

It's a minor miracle you're not reading something dog-centric every week. That it's been limited to two posts is commendable. Or something. Here comes No. 3.

This is Duke, the reason I find it funny Daisy won't go in the water.

We had a chocolate lab named Duke (or Dukakis, or Olympia) who died in January. The day after he went to the big dog park in the sky, I was on petfinder.com looking at what was available for chocolate lab females in New England. "I found one that's perfect for us," I told my Mom. "It gives me hope that, when we are ready for a new dog, it will be easy to find one."

In the greatest listening error of our lives, TW overheard the phone conversation. She heard me say "it's perfect for us." And nothing else.

Daisy was in Connecticut, her profile said. You have to understand this about the Northeast. There are a lot of states in a small area, and Connecticut is only three hours from here. Also, people don't give up their dogs here like they do in the South. Seriously, check out today's Petfinder listings. The nearest pure-ish looking chocolate lab is in Providence, Rhode Island.

But Connecticut's not that bad, we figured. Even better, after we got done with the application for Daisy and were accepted, we were told that she was actually in Tennessee but would be transported up to New Hampshire, an hour's drive from our house. Great. Sign us up.

Then things got complicated. I left town on a vacation because they told us Daisy wouldn't be ready to be transported, due to her recent spaying (ouch!). At the last minute, they asked if they could ship Daisy up on Weekend No. 1 after all. Uh, no. I'm going to be in Florida. Thanks, though.

This is a wet lab in a Tennessee vet's office.

During the ensuing week, Daisy got kennel cough while staying at the vet's office. It's not a life-threatening condition, but she couldn't be transported to New England on Weekend No. 2. After a week, she was still recovering slowly and they told us Daisy would not be traveling on Weekend No.  3.

By this time, we were at our breaking point. We felt sad everytime we came down the stairs and Duke wasn't sitting on the couch. Or you dropped a piece of food on the floor and a dog wasn't there to lap it up. It was cold and snowy and I was trapped in the house. It was time to go pick up this dog from Tennessee.

The volunteer agency in Tennessee was over the moon with happiness because people only very rarely come down to pick up a dog. The way I figured it, I would burn 70 gallons of $3 a gallon gas. That's $210. Her transport fee was $150. So it wasn't that much more expensive to just drive down, stay with a friend or two along the way and pick up the dog.

Why all these pictures of me?

And that's how I ended up in Bristol, Tennesee, on a Sunday at 10:30 a.m. She had just gotten a bath and was worked up -- which isn't hard to do with an 8-month-old lab.

I was a nervous wreck on the drive back. "Don't pee in the backseat. Don't poop in the backseat. Oh God, I have to go in the store to get a soda. Don't eat the steering wheel."

She was an angel -->

She basically just curled up in the front seat and slept the whole way. I stopped after a few hours of driving, figuring she would want to pee or poop. She would just stand there, eating snow, looking at me funny. "Why are we stopped here?" she must have wondered.

As it turns out, I got lucky. Lucky that I didn't know her, because I would drive to San Diego for this dog, knowing what I know now.