FIRST DATE, WORST DATE EVER!

(re-run)

As I watched the end of the Oscars with a little dog cozied up in the chair with me and my sister asking when she could go to bed, I thought back on the man I met two nights before, the one who wanted to get a Doodle Dane, a cross breed between a Great Dane and a poodle. I’d heard of another new cross breed called a Chug, a cross between a Chihuahua and a Pug. So with all the commercials and the boring awards between the good awards, I Googled dog cross breeds and came up with 15 just for poodle mixes.
You have your Cockapoo, Maltipoo, Labradoodle, Golden Doodle, Schnoodle, Peekapoo. Yorkipoo, Pompapoo, Shipoo, Doxiepoo, Cavapoo, Boxerpoodle, Lhasa Poo, Corgipoo, Great Danoodle,and Jackapoo.
But that’s just part poodle.
Then you have your Pitsky, Chusky, Dalmachshund, Labsky, Beagleman, Pomsky, Horgi, Bullpug, and Shorgi. I am sure there are many more. You might already have a designer breed dog in your house.
So why write about this? Because new dog breeds are never ending. These cross-breeds may not be welcomed at the purebred Kennel Club dog shows, not yet, anyway. But when a random guy talks about his prospective Doodle Dane at the local watering hole, you know they’ve gone mainstream.
When Pepper was a puppy, I met a lot of people in the greenbelt (park by my house). One of them had some sort of doodle variety, and he was upset that the cross breed that was supposed to weigh sixty pounds had grown into a seventy-five pound dog. No one can predict for sure how much a dog will weigh, but 75 pounds? That’s too big, if you ask me.
The vet guessed 45 pounds for my Labrador mix puppy, but she has turned into a fifty-five pound adult. She is sweet most of the time, with a little attitude on walks. Today she is my favorite since the little rescue girl weirdo accidentally punctured my finger when taking a treat from me. I know she didn’t mean to, but man, did it hurt! I called her a few choice names in front of my sister. In the end, I know it was my fault. The dogs are both protective of their food. I wasn’t giving them both treats at the same time. I was giving the little one a treat so I could take the big one for a walk. She wanted to be sure the right dog got the treat.
My other sister just got a puppy. She is the same age I was when I got mine. She says, what was she thinking? I say never again. That’s why I rescued Daisy. She has her share of issues, but she is an adult dog, house broken, and not as squirrelly as a puppy. And she’s plenty squirrelly.
All I have to do is look at my finger to be reminded.
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This is my 291st blog post. It was supposed to be a blog about first worst dates. Yes, I’ve done a number of them – my own, friends’, friends of friends’, even strangers’ worst ones. A bunch of men have told me they’ve never had a bad date. Let that sink in for a while. Do we women have too high of expectations? Are we more honest? Is our checklist longer?
My posts feed in to my Facebook page. Friends from around the country officially like my posts — from Virginia, Georgia, San Diego, or one town over. Others tell me so in emails or texts. Some of you tell me in person when I run into you.
The official likes come through WordPress. But you have to have an account, so many of you don’t bother. The ones that do bother, your photo pops up in my email when you like my stuff. I get to see what you look like, how old you are. It’s fun, since this is my first encounter writing for adults. My audience has always been the three to ten year old set.
About a third of my posts are autobiographical, my digital memoir, if you will. I’ve rerun 50 stories or so, and I will rerun more before the year is up. I’ve learned a lot about my friends, how you met your spouse, fell in love and got married, how you date guy after guy, never to find the one, how you’ve tried every dating site out there. I’ve learned about Bumble and Grindr and Zoosk. I’ve learned that some of my worst dates comes nowhere close to your encounters with druggies, homeless people, or others keeping deep dark secrets.
Getting through the interview is half the fun. Sometimes I have to pull it out of you, other times you write it yourself. Sometimes you get upset when I tweak it a bit. Your memory of my autobiographical stuff is different from mine. I write down your stories on bar napkins, scraps of paper, pocket calendars, and little notebooks that I keep everywhere.
So keep on reading, and I will keep on writing. I was ready to do something different with my life. Now, exactly a year since I went to get my sister and move her into my house with me, I have retired, gotten a second dog, written every day, and learned to cook again.

My apologies to Cookie Monster, a PomChee, who was inadvertently left out of this post.  This is a re-run post, and as Michael Buble would say, I just hadn’t met you yet.

 
Except for the puncture wound on my finger, I think I like it.