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. Here they are, waiting, with Thor comforting our grrrrrrl:

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.

Greetings from my office in Myre-Big Island State Park!  It’s the perfect place for a client meeting, and a meeting with a local attorney, drafting a Petition for Reconsideration… nothing like having a fully equipped office with wheels!  The downside is that there’s a season where it works, and a season where it doesn’t — for sure it does not work in the dead of winter.

We’re getting to the end of the season, it came to an end too quickly.  There was about an inch of snow here, it rained/sleeted/snowed all night Friday and all day Saturay.  Sunday morning people cleared out of here like it was on fire.  Our furnace and little heater kept up well, and one down comforter was sufficient!

Cooking was kinda rough the first two days, but washing dishes was worse!  Then today arrived and the sun was out and it was beautiful!

Sadie got to play with her “cousin” Sandie at the dog park two days running, and she was a happy, pooped, and socialist puppy!  They’re getting along quite well, but Sandie is… well… a PUPPY!  She’s now bigger than Sadie, plump and jiggly, whereas Sadie is for sure greyhound style.

Got to see little bro’s “new” house, and, well, it’s a good thing he didn’t get the first one he told me about down there, Hwy 13 in Hartland, right near Bernie and Cheryl Hagen and right in Bent Tree!  DON’T YOU DARE!  I sent Alan and Sadie out to play while I was writing, and there was some serious bonding going on the first day at the dog park and Home Depot.  A few mods to the camper, we now have two more stable tables, and a new outlet where the camper was designed for an air conditioner plug, so running little electric heater and oven or tea kettle at the same time is no problem.  One less thing to think about.  It was odd, there were two circuits, everything was on one, and nothing on the other, but all set up and ready to run, just needed an outlet. Who needs an air conditioner, particularly in a camper!  But we all need another outlet, eh?

Only one more meeting to go, and then homeward bound!

 

 

Alan tells me there are no photos of our cats on Legalectric!  How can that be?  Here’s Maggie (the tortise) and Thor (white with grey) the day we got them, just after their much needed bath.  That was November 1 or so, the neighbors were moving and had all these kittens… I’d met their mother when she came over to our 100-mile garage sale and spent the day hanging out with us:

I’d put food out for her on the deck, put out a basket for her to lounge in, and wanted to bring her in to be spayed, because she was “living” in their little storage shed, but I couldn’t take that on then.  Drat, because maybe four months later, there were kittens running around.  Then they had to move, and had all these kittens, then it was down to two, and I saw one on one of the city’s fb pages, recognized the houses in the background, went over with a cat carrier.  They stayed in Summer’s HUGE dog crate for 2 weeks as they and the dog adjusted:

Next thing you know, Little Sadie has two new friends:

And then phone had “catastrophic failure” and there went all the photos!  … sigh… yes, CATastrophic, off into the interwebs.  Disaster… cute photos gone. Oh well, plenty more around.

Over 640 Xcel Energy customers (households, businesses) are without power here in Red Wing this morning after the storms came whipping through here yesterday afternoon.  Ours was out for a while, maybe an hour, and then back on.  Towards the west end of town, that’s another story, and they’re still without power.

Xcel Energy Outage Map

From the map, it looks like Eau Claire was very hard hit, with 2,300+ customers still without power.

The Dogometer predicted a bad storm about half an hour before it hit, evident when she firmly assumed the position under my desk.  Now she’s back to normal.

 

Summer is doing so well, she’s got the “going outside” thing down, has learned “sit” and “wait” and is working on “down” (on command, she spends a lot of time in “down” naturally), and is working things out with Kady.  Right now, all three are surrounding my chair, black and tan office rug, even Sadie, who usually spends the day upstairs with Alan.

Three dogs take a lot of time, especially if they’re not on the same schedule.  Here they are today, in sync!  Summer’s first walk on a Gentle Leader, she’s a lot peppier than we expected, and she’ll be doing some walking in her old age.  What a relief!!!