Tonight is a guest post by the best wife in the world.

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Rosie Rosita Girl, the sweetest seventy pound lap dog in the world, was a rescue from the local doggie concentration camp on Memorial Weekend.  I had lost my other dog to age about a year ago and had been looking for a new puppy but hadn’t had any luck at the local foster pet leagues.  We were scheduled to see “Gladiator” with Russell Crowe – hubba hubba – and my friend, another doggie lover, took me to the local SPCA where we found a girl dog with Rottweiler coloring, the opposite of my other dog, a white male.   The caretaker there said she was the sweetest dog, gentle and caring, jumped up and put her paws on his shoulder and would lay on her back and let other dogs smell her without any problems.  When I went in to see her, she ran over and stuck her head under my arm.  I was whipped.

So I had Rosie, a Rottweiler/Lab mix, for about two years when enters the cutest husband-to-be.  Rosie takes one look and is in love.  I rescued her and she is laying across my lap when he walks in the room.  She sighs (I swear she did!), gets an adoring look on her face, and follows him around the room with her eyes.   When he is leaving to go up to his apartment and I was going up to meet him, he opened the front door, Rosie without even looking back runs out and jumps in the passenger seat of his truck and looks back at me like “kiss, kiss, I’m going with him”.   Of course he was grinning ear to ear, smugly.

Four years later, after a marriage and several discussions of whose dog Rosie really was, she does lay on my head when it thunders and rains at night, we were suckered in to taking on Hank. 

My vet, who has known me through two dogs and two cats, asked if I wanted a puppy. 

Well, what’s the story?  A puppy, maybe 8-12 months old, had been hit on a local road and they were looking for a good Samaritan to sponsor the surgery.  Well, what was wrong with him? Shattered left front leg, broken left hind leg and pelvis.  What would happen if he didn’t get the surgery? Oh, they’d just put him down.  They’d kill him?! They knew they had me then.  Yep, we sponsored the surgery and adopted him, and as you can see, he’s pretty cute. 

My vet said he’s a Water Dog (we live on the coast) but we think he’s part Jack Russell and Brittany Spaniel, and full of piss and vinegar.  No body told him that he has a bum leg, and even though he limps, when he is low running – you know down to the ground focused, intense running like chasing a squirrel – there is no limp, or slowness.  He teleports to high places, like the back of the couch (he’s only about 17 inches tall and 30 pounds) which is about 28 inches tall, wraps his arms around my neck and puts his head on mine. 

Rosie was not at all sure that she needed a companion when we brought him home.  Actually she was pretty sure she didn’t, and made it clear every time she looked at us, with disgust and suffering.  She does get him back; every time he comes in from the outside, either from a walk or the backyard, she puts her whole mouth around him and plants him in the carpet.  Yep, just letting him know she’s the boss, the Alpha dog, and he shouldn’t forget it.  Of course being the street dog he is (was) he jumps up and races around the house barking and jumping up to bite her back in the neck. 

Finally though, at Christmas, they got up on the same couch to sleep and Rosie didn’t give him a problem.  She actually let him up stay up there, comfortably, companionably.  However, as soon as we got home, she was letting him know that she was the boss again, not willing to share space or us.  Sigh, maybe it was just the Christmas spirit.

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