Introductions

I’ll be spending the next few weeks culling through old posts, removing some that were contrived, forced, posted for the sake of posting something. In the meantime, I think it’s important to make some introductions. Six years and all.

Meet Frankie and Sasha. These girls currently live with me part-time, as a matter of custody arrangements (more on that later), and I get the joy of spending every other week spoiling them with hikes, swims, and way too many baby carrots.

My sweet, loyal, neurotic, too-smart Carmen passed away in November 2013 at 5½ years old due to kidney disease, which she had battled most of her too-short life.

Just three weeks later, I came across a scraggly, injured, smelly black puppy aimlessly wandering the mean streets of Beaumont, TX. She was worse for the wear and looked like spare parts, but she was the epitome of friendly. We wrapped her in a towel and she promptly fell asleep in my arms. I dubbed her Frankenstein’s dog, which was shortened to Frankie, and with a name and demeanor like that I couldn’t let her go.

One year later, the Austin Animal Center’s heaters failed at their overflow location, and they released an emergency call for fosters. We stepped up and took home a pitiful, shivering, patchy black bulldog with perpetual allergies and a tennis ball problem, who had been stuck there for a full year - over half of her life, at that point. Turns out no one wants to adopt a patchy black bulldog, and thus Sasha became part of the family as well.

Both girls turned five this past February, which was a landmark for me having lost Carmen at that age. It was a welcome dose of reality to know that if I’m lucky, I have another eight to ten years with these girls. That comes to roughly 20 more birthday pupcakes, 500 hikes, and 7000 baby carrots that I’ve already budgeted for.