Sooner or later, everyone writes about their pets. Since I’ve been unemployed (two months today, in fact), I’ve been spending an inordinate amount of time with our dogs. We currently have three–one very old, one very neurotic, and one very young. At the risk of sounding macabre, we made a conscious choice to have an overlap with the very old dog and the very young dog. Which is not to say that we want the very old dog to die. But she is 17 years old, which is pretty freaking old for a dog. However, she is a Schipperke mix, and they can live to be, oh, 17 or 18 (or 19 or 20). Her name is Scooter. She’s a small, stout,, fluffy black waddle of a dog with cataracts in both eyes, nasty teeth, and breath that causes grown men to pass out at 10 paces. I love her to pieces.

The neurotic dog is named Juno. She’s almost two. She looks like a cross between a Sheltie and a German Shepard but has the moves and neuroses of a Border Collie. She doesn’t seem to get tired (even after I run four miles with her or let her romp through the woods for an hour or two off the leash) and is eager to please to the point of being infuriating. She is also the smartest dog either I or my husband have ever had, obedient, protective, and cuddly. If she didn’t still pull on the leash, she’d be the perfect dog.

Then there’s the puppy. Mason. (The correct pronunciation is more like, “MAAY-son!”) He’s a black lab mix. At about five and a half months, he weighs in at about 38 pounds (or as much as Juno) and appears to be gaining about 2-2.5 pounds a week. He is all legs and paws and head and joyful puppy slobber. When I walked him and Juno this morning (after having already run a couple miles with Juno, which did nothing to deplete her energy level), we stopped and talked to John, one of our neighbors. I mentioned something about the puppy. John looked at Mason and said, “That’s a puppy?”

This is my pack.