Things around here are getting back to normal, just with less dog hair. I think we are all faring well, its been hard to adjust to the little things that had become so much a part of daily life. I left everything as it was for a day and then on day two I vacuumed, and instead of just vacuuming up dog hair I felt like I was vacuuming up Sandy. The hardest thing for me to do was dump the water out of her bowl and put it away. Every single time I walked past it I kept saying, “oh yeah, I need to fill it, its almost empty” because it was just second nature to fill up the dog bowl a few times a day.

But now, a few days later I am just reminded of what a great dog she was. I’ve been scrolling through our pictures and looking back at old pictures of her made me realize, she hasn’t really been “Sandy” for a long time. And that probably more than anything else gives me some peace about our decision. PC and I have been swapping favorite Sandy stories and all the little quirks that made her her- they’ve been gone for awhile now.

We got Sandy at the humane society in 2003. I had had a yellow lab growing up and thought they were the greatest cutest dogs on earth. Thats all I wanted to get. Pure bred labs were hard to come by, so my husband, being the computer nerd that he is wrote a program that monitored the humane societies web page and every time it was updated with a new Lab for adoption it emailed us. And that is how we found the Great Sandino. The family that dropped her off filled out a sheet about her personality and life up to that point, and it is just about the most depressing thing ever- she spent 14 hours a day in a crate in a garage. The family gave her up because they moved and didn’t want to put a fence in their new yard (riiight- because she spent so much time outside?)

I had big hopes of renaming her something “colorado-ish” like Aspen or Summit but Sandy had always been her name so who was I to change it. After having her for only 1 month I decided I was tired of being an apartment dweller with a dog (need: back yard for dog). So, we bought a house a month later. For the first two years we had her she went with PC to work everyday. While she may have started out my dog, she quickly turned into PC’s best little buddy. When we moved to Virginia she was our little backseat companion the whole way cross country. Despite so many people questioning why we would move a dog to Japan, we never even thought twice about it. She was part of our family and she was coming with us.

When I was trying to pick out pictures to post I was trying to find ones that most captured her spirit. She was a great dog; a little high strung, scared of everything and sort of high maintenance, but loving, great with kids, always wanted to make us happy and wanted to be loved. Above all else she just wanted to be with us. We were the family she always wanted. I know it.

This is how I’ll always remember her: big brown eyes, big smile on her face, tail wagging, ready to play and always, *always* happy to see us.

Filed under: The Great Sandino