What do you do when you are up to your eyeballs in work?

Meet Suzie.  Yep, we've finally gone and done it.  It's been 16 years since we've had a dog.  We stopped moving around the country 6 years ago, and for the past two years, something just seemed to be missing.  A ranch needs a dog. It's not easy for an OCD to have a dog.  Mucky feet, accidents, dog hair, and doggie smells go against just about every fiber of a clean freak, but then again, so does all the other ickies that come with keeping up a ranch.  But up until now, I could keep the ick outside the house.

We talked the pros and cons to death.  But no matter how many times the cons won out and I came back to the world of the sane, another dog would pop up on my humane society adoption page.  Of course our search reached it's peak about the same time the whole country was snatching up every lonely animal in every shelter.  We were far down on the lists as each fur ball came up for adoption.  I decided it was Fate's way of making sure the right dog came to us.  We applied for 5 dogs over the period of a few months, but we weren't first in line.  The last dog came from a family of small children, and when the decision came between us and another family, the adoption agency chose the family that had children.  Needless to say, I as heartbroken again, and was ready to give up.  On a whim I opened up my adoption pages.

There she was.  She was older, over 8.  She was given up on. She was very broken. We locked eyes.  She was mine.  Fate pushed all those other dogs aside so that I could step in and save her.  She was more than twice her allowable weight.  She had blown out her knee and the muscle had atrophied.  She had to have major surgery and two full months of hard rehabilitation.  No families wanted to step up and work with her.  Three rescue societies and a kind vet refused to give up on her.  So we wouldn't either.

She's been here for three weeks and she's a riot.  She's a full blown beagle.  Her nose rules her brain.  She has a couple of habits we are breaking her of, like sofa sleeping or trashcan raiding, but that's trivial.  As a hunting dog, we do choose to keep her away from the livestock altogether.  Although she can watch them from the deck.  She finds the alpacas intriguing and the chickens are something to be gruffed and hummed at. 

She is glued to Doc when he gets home.

Sometimes she'll just wander around the house looking for him or sit in the laundry room, waiting for him to walk into the house.  I'm the big meanie who gives her her medicine (ear medicine is NOT a favorite), does her physical therapy, takes her on therapy walks, gives her baths, shoos her off the sofa, puts her in the kennel when it's time to run errands or do ranch chores. But Doc is the king of the beagle universe. LOL.

So welcome Suzie, I'm sure you'll be quite the added feature to the blog.