Legalectric

We said goodbye to our Sadie yesterday, and I’m loading all my photos of her for Alan, and, well, 3 hours remaining to fill up the thumb drive. So I’m going through them… sigh… 14 years is a long time together.

That’s our Little Sadie above, her first winter with us, December 2010, near her birthday. You can see the greyhound in her, but the shih tzu not so much:

I met her at Dog Days of Stockholm, August 14, 2010, when I’d volunteered at the shelter to take a dog down and show her off. I was initially offered a little poof-dog, and no way. I traded that one for Sadie. She did her magic with me, riding down to Stockholm with her chin on my shoulder the whole way — such a sweetie. Much later, I learned that she was after the crumbs on my shirt… oh well. I did show her off, talked her up, but no luck. I’d learned a little of her story, she’d been found as a stray in March, 2010, and had been in the shelter since. Only nine months old and 6 months of that in the shelter during her most crucial developmental time. She needed a home STAT, and I couldn’t resist, even though she was not a German Shepherd.

Sadie came home with me for the weekend to test her out with Kady, and it went OK, though she was overwhelmed I think (horrible photo, old camera). And she was so small, particularly compared to our sheps, but she as still a baby, and became knows as our “medium pup.”

We agreed she was a good fit and Alan signed on the bottom line, wrote a check, and she was ours. Little did we know what life with a nine month old puppy was like.

THIS was the essence of Sadie — here she is “playing tennis” with Kady:

Kady was not too impressed, note the eye roll:

Sadie was always on the move until around 3 years old. She chewed everything in sight, including 2 pairs of Alan’s Rayban glasses, a phone, hair brushes, shoes, a library book, and the little bitch counter-surfed a holiday dessert to the floor, a GINGER CHEEZECAKE! Ate almost all of it, and did not get sick. That theft was serious…

And she chewed on and unrolled hundreds of rolls of toilet paper, no matter how they were loaded:

All the sheps were older when we adoped them. Kady was probably 7, and she and Sadie basically got along, but Sadie was for sure a bit too much for her. I don’t think there were any bloody spats, but for sure a few snarls and snarks. Then we adopted Summer, our “hospice” dog, who at 12 was rescued from a Gary, IN shelter. We drove to Wisconsin and loaded her up, this time, it was Sadie who was not too impressed and she may have wanted us to take Summer back. That tongue says it all:

And yet Sadie was very afraid of Steiner, they were never close:

After Summer and Kady died in 2014, we got the pop up camper, and Sadie LOVED camping. Though she could have jumped right through the rear screen, she was content inside, learned to be less reactive, and understood that all those dogs being walked on the site loop belonged there:

The easiest way to get her joyfully bouncing around was to ask her “Do you want to go CAMPING?!?!”

That first year, we went out west to the Black Hills and Hell Creek State Park on the Ft. Peck reservoir, and back through Ft. Stevens State Park in North Dakota and Scenic State Park in northern Minnesota.

In 2017, we went on a long trip along the UP and whew, did it rain:, but as long as she was headed somewhere in the van, she was happy:

Sadie enjoyed camp-hosting in the hybrid “office” at Myre-Big Island, despite the heavy rain:

We spent a lot of time at Myre-Big Island through the years when I was representing Association of Freeborn County Landowners, which I think she found rather boring:

We also picnicked often at Frontenac, staring at Wisconsin’s West Bank:

Spring 2022 we went out west, to Devil’s Tower and Craters of the Moon and places in between:

This spring, before camp hosting, I went to New Mexico, and she was as utterly freaked out by the 60 mph winds as I was. Here in the calm before the storm:

We bailed and caught our breath in hotel in Wichita!

Sadie, Alan, and I camp-hosted through the entire month May this year, yes all month, and she enjoyed being outdoors so much, and of course, she was also so happy to be snoozing in the tent. Here she is supervising clean-up after an intense storm that took out our screen tent, one of many storms that month:

Though we were camp-hosting at Frontenac, she spent some of that time back and forth to Red Wing with Alan.

Did I mention that Sadie loved our new kitties? Oh, right, that’s probably because she didn’t, really. Election day 2016, neighbors across the street posted cats to give away, and I grabbed the cat carrier and grabbed two cats, Maggie and Thor. They each fit in my hand, that small. They were in a cage or a week to adjust, and then freedom. Turned out that the torty female loved Sadie, and was her emotional support animal when it was storming. Thor and Sadie had little to do with each other until the last month or so, when I think Thor sensed Sadie was fading, and he spent a lot of time snuggled with her.

Similarly, when Kady was fading with doggy dementia, though she and Sadie were not close, Sadie comforted Kady, as if she knew.

When Alan was hospitalized with leukemia, she missed him as much as he missed her, so I organized a picnic outside the door, and they both were so happy to see each other. This is my all time favorite photo of her — just look at her smile:

Some time after that, she started going downhill. Her driver-rear knee went out, it was twisting as she walked, and she had trouble on the stairs. She also started peeing randomly, without any notice, no bark, nothing. At that point, she had started on pee pills, and her dosage was increased, but we were often up sometime between 2-4 a.m. to take her out. She still enjoyed going for rides, picnics, and we didn’t camp much due to leukemia, just once in July 2023. She mostly laid around then, which was perfect because Alan was still in the middle of treatment.

Then in June, we went around the south side of Lake Superior to Ontario. She was pretty much stuffed into a packed car, and went along for the ride. She spent most of the time in the tent, snoozing.

The last few months, maybe 6 months, both knees were giving out, her Meloxicam dose was increased, but that’s just blocking pain, there was nothing we could really do. She was coughing now and then and panting all the time, congestive heart failure. She’d also slowed down eating, so we were bribing her with special treats, real lamb hearts, and I even baked her a turkey last week. Then, this last week, she pretty much stopped eating and was emitting with no notice, out of control and really gross, and just laying around, no spark at all. Alan noted later that he thought she’d looked at him eye to eye and told him “I’m done.”

We both spent all day yesterday sitting with her as we, waited for word from the vet, and then time to go in — what a long, painful wait that was. Now we’re left with memories of her, and so many photos to remind us of those 14 years we were all together. 3.3gb — so many photos that I had to let it run all night! And after that another 4 hours copying photos of her from all the travel files. AAACK! Fond memories for those two days of consolidating.

We’re missing our doggy. Fourteen years and one week she was with us, and every time we do anything at all, we’re looking for her. All these photos are comforting, remembering what a good long time we did have with her, that she went everywhere with us, almost, except airplanes and trains. She was a high mileage grrrrrrrl, with us for 14 years and one week. Sadie was the best grrrrrrrrrrrl.