I’ll start with the tales. Yesterday was the day for family portraits. It turned out to be the worst one ever. I’m pretty sure that anyone who knows me knows how much I hate having pictures taken of myself, unless I have a dog in the picture with me. I also have no ability to role play, or act or be funny or cute on command. It’s just not me! I never have been able to play charades, unless I’m just guessing. I just panic and freeze when people are staring at me. I’m not new to this family either, so that makes what happened yesterday even more odd.

We did our obligatory huge family portrait. Then my husband’s grandmother wanted groupings of every possible combination of the individual families…all normal, all expected. What I didn’t expect was after she had my husband and I do our “family shot” together. Apparently, while I had been out of the room, they had done shots of the grandkids and they put my husband on this fainting couch. The photographer told him to stretch out, so being the joker he is, he sprawled himself out on the couch, and the family thought it was hilarious. I don’t quite get it myself, but whatever. Anyway…they decide that they want a picture of him posed like that, and call me in to stand behind him. In the meantime I’m getting calls from clients about boarding dogs, and I’m trying to get a hold of my friend that is staying at my house taking care of things to let her know that dogs are coming, etc. So, they call me in and I stand behind this couch and they say, “now put your hands on your hips and look mad”. Are you kidding me? A day later I still can’t figure out for the life of me what kind of a picture they wanted. So, as usual, I’m just getting more embarrassed and panicked by the moment having all these people staring at me. If I’d have had my wish, the ground would have just opened up and swallowed me up. All the while, they are telling me to stand there with my hands on my hips looking mad. “now look at the camera” they say. So, I’m thinking…am I supposed to look mad at the camera, at my husband, what? LOL

My favorite thing they said is…”ooooo Poor Marie, ….you don’t have to do this if you don’t want to”. I said flat out: “I DON’T WANT TO DO THIS!” It was pointless though, they don’t really mean that you don’t have to do something, it’s just their way of being polite I guess. It’s really dumb. They are really sweet people, but they do the oddest things. And then they apologize for it the rest of the day. “Oh, we’re sorry we made you do that picture”. Hmmm, then don’t do it. Simple! I just never could figure out why in the world out of all those people who enjoy doing silly things and having pictures taken, they made my husband and I do that picture. No one else had to do anything like that.

Anyway, after that we had to go pick up a dog from the county shelter down there for Sheltie Rescue. Which brings me to the “no tails” portion of this post. The poor little guy had been picked up by animal control. Apparently he’d broken off of make shift chain, (made of baling twine) and gotten hit by a car. No one had claimed him. His injuries were bad enough that they had to amputate his front leg. Amazingly, the shelter found help in getting that surgery taken care of. In addition to that, he’d gotten himself into foxtails, whether in the time he was staked out somewhere, or in his travels afterwards, so they had to shave him down. They called Sheltie Rescue to ask if they would take him into their program. Well, it’s always usual to ask for pictures of the dogs in question to make sure that they really are dealing with a Sheltie. Unfortunately, animal control rarely sends ideal pictures. LOL So, it was a debate whether this was a sheltie or not, but the decision was made to take him in.

I volunteered to pick him up and do transport for them. I’ll let you be the judge, but when I got there, I didn’t see much Sheltie in this little dog. What I was greeted by was a very dejected looking little dog and one very excited shelter worker. She was so thrilled that we’d agreed to take him, and went on and on about how happy she was that we thought he was a sheltie too, and that he was such a great little dog, etc, etc, etc. I’m a total sucker, so we just loaded “Sheldon” and off we went.

When I picked him up yesterday we went to look at his teeth and a foxtail had embedded itself in his gums. We pulled it out and he had a very sore looking hole in his gums. He is the most patient little guy though, my friend and I sat with him last night and pullled out a handful more of foxtails out of his belly, feet, armpits etc and he did nothing more than lick us as we pulled them out of the sores in his skin. He is a little thin, but I think that being shaved down, is making it look worse than it would normally too. He also has a docked tail. If I was to guess, I would have said that he might be a Mini Aussie or a mix of an Aussie. I don’t know where else that docked tail would have come from. Regardless, he’s a very sweet boy, and hopefully Sheltie Rescue won’t be too upset with me, for not contradicting what they had told the shelter staff earlier about us taking him.