This short video of her was taken while walking near the Daybreak Community Center. Almost every day, she likes to bound through the weeds with a smiling joy.

I wished for a dog like Nina and I’m so glad that the two of us can have these quiet happy times every morning.

I’ve never seen a dog so unwilling to play in my life. She doesn’t like toys and just ignores them. She doesn’t want to play fetch, tug-o-war, or even chew the toys. Elvis has tried in vain to get her to play with him, but she just avoids him or retreats to her bed. Mike and I got her to play with some bubbles a couple of nights ago, but she refused to even look at them last night.

The only thing that makes her smile is a walk. She loves to run in the park and is always surprised when the leash runs out of slack and she’s pulled back. She loves to smell every plant and post along the way.

How can it be that the only play she is interested in is a walk? Is this common?

We talked some more about Jack Russel Terriers and Australian Shepherds before the conversation turned to something different, but something had changed. Mike and I were looking for a dog. As of Friday afternoon, we started looking. We lost a lovely Australian Shepherd named Disco to a family with two kids, but I really think that was for the best because yesterday, we found Nina.

She’s a Chihuahua/Dachshund mix, so she’s bigger than a Chihuahua and much more calm. Here is her picture from the Humane Society:

They also made a video of her to try to get her adopted:

I’m surprised that she had to come all the way from Los Angeles to find us. I imagine she was originally owned by a woman who enjoyed carrying her around the posh places in L.A. When she grew up, however, her Dachshund side made her a tad too big to carry around everywhere, so she was sent away for a different trendy pet. She wasn’t treated badly, she just became too large for the flighty woman’s purse.

Well, she’s EXACTLY the right size for us. I took her for a walk this morning around Daybreak. She was good when we passed other dogs, joggers and bicycles.

She’s never been taught the basics like sit and stay, much less the litany of tricks we are planning on teaching her, but she does know come. Most importantly, she loves a treat, so we’ll be able to teach her how to be a perfect dog for us.

Right now, she’s passed out on the couch after her three mile walk with me. It’s good to have a dog in the house again.

Update 06-20-11: Dr. Lynette verified that Nina is approximately four years old, so we’re considering her birthday to be June 12, 2007. She also got a clean bill of health, so we are so happy we will be having her in our lives for a long time.

We came home yesterday at about 4pm and Sid was acting groggy, ashamed and lethargic. There was a tiny amount of slobbery puke on the floor under the kitchen table. He was so changed that we immediately took him to the vet. They checked him out and said that he looked fine, but to watch him over the evening. We took him home and he lay next to us the whole time. After a couple of hours, we tried to wake him up, but he was so loopy that he barely noticed us, so we drove him back to the vet’s. They took his blood and gave him a few X-rays, but while he was on the X-ray table, he had a gran mal seizure that stopped his heart. They tried CPR to revive him, but he was gone that quick.

The doctor did what he could to find out what went wrong. The blood work came back almost perfect. He was slightly anemic, but everything else looked great. The X-rays looked pretty good as well. There was a slight growth on his liver, but a death of liver failure would have taken about three days, not three hours. The slobbery puke on the floor indicates that he must have had a seizure at our home while we were out. The doctor was able to rule out poison and other toxins. Considering the two seizures and lack of other indicators, the vet thinks that it was a brain tumor.

I know we took the best care of him while he was alive. I had Dr. Lynette’s office fax over all his records to the emergency vet and we were able to compare all of his blood work every year for his whole life. We took really good care of him and we rushed him to the vet the second we noticed there was something off about him. He died quickly and without pain, so I’m grateful for that.

I’ve been looking at all my old videos of Sid. Here are my favorites.

We have been leaving the Bevmo Bag out on the floor lately just because it has become Elvis’ latest nemesis. He simply can’t understand why he can’t get inside of the thing. Since it is a bag meant to transport glass bottles, it has dividers in it that are just large enough for Elvis’ head only.

That doesn’t stop him from trying to put his whole body into it several times a week.

I’m sitting in my blue comfy chair. I have Elvis on the left arm, looking out the window, following every movement of birds and debris. I have Maggie to my right, sitting on the footstool and Sid on the floor.

I always imagine an alien group observing us. They can tell where all the life forms are in the house and notice that we all congregate in one room, no matter the size of the house. In fact, we are all congregated in one corner of that one room.

I imagine that they would find this behavior strange. Why would they all hover in one tiny corner of that large dwelling? Are they scared? They aren’t close enough to be getting any warmth from each other. They each seem to be moving of their own free will. Why do they congregate when they could spread out? They must get some benefit from the close proximity, despite their differences in genetic make up. What is it?

I rolled my eyes and considered leaving my reading and comfy couch to further stop this obsession. I listened carefully and determined that it didn’t sound like the furtive, chomp, chomp, chomp of Elvis’ plastic eating. It sounded like he was just playing with a plastic bag instead. Laziness overtook me and I went back to my reading, but the noise continued.

Then the noise moved. The sound of a plastic bag moved from a distant irritation to an approaching ruckus. I could hear it advancing from the bedroom to the staircase at an increasing speed. I put down my reading and got off the couch to investigate, but before I could get up even one stair, the crinkling was halfway down the stairs.

In a streak of white and gray fur, Elvis ran past me toward the kitchen, but the fluffy sound of the plastic bag was still coming at me from the staircase. In a panic, Maggie and the plastic bag rushed past me, following Elvis. She wasn’t chasing him, so much as she was chased by the bag wrapped around her neck. Rather than follow Elvis into the kitchen, she ran like a cheetah away from the noisy monster attached to her body. I laughed at her skittish attempt to escape the crinkle monster that she had unwittingly climbed through.

She rushed up the stairs, plastic bag in tow as I tried to grab her. I laughed again and followed to the bedroom level. Mike called from the top of the stairs, “I’m sure that was hilarious, but it just woke me up…” His groggy voice told me that he wasn’t fully awake. “You tied a bag to the cat?!” I finished climbing and rushed to defend myself, “I didn’t do it.” I was still laughing, trying to find where Maggie had hidden.

I followed Mike’s dazed gaze to my comfy chair in my office. I looked under the chair and there was a shell-shocked Maggie with the bag still around her neck. Her excited run had torn it to shreds, but it still hung strong around her neck. She cowered away from me as I reached under the chair. I grabbed the handle of the bag and removed it from her neck, trying my best to control my laughter.

It was the plastic bag that had brought home my boots from the store. I had removed the boots, wore them, deemed them completely unusable for winter snow and abandoned them, all without ever throwing away the bag on my bedroom floor. Maggie must have crawled in it, had a bout of play with Elvis and tried to escape through the handle instead of the proper opening. I could envision the entire event and I laughed.

I put my sleep-deprived husband back to bed and sat down at the computer keyboard. “I’ll just have to remember this,” I told myself.

When I noticed her playing, I pressed pause on the TiVo, which disrupted her play. Just knowing that I was watching her play was enough to stop the festivities. It was as if she was some sort of sub-atomic particle refusing to both play and be observed at the same time. There was no way I would be able to film her. She wouldn’t even let me watch her.

Elvis peeked around the furniture trying to catch a glimpse of her playing with his discarded toy, but she noticed him. Sid pretended not to watch her play by lying his head down on the carpet, but kept an uneasy eye on her the entire time. With an audience of three, it was too much for her bashful nature and she abandoned the mouse on the third stair next to the scratching post.

The total time she played with the mouse was maybe twenty seconds before the three of us stopped our respective activities and watched her in amazement. Twenty seconds of pure and unadulterated joy washed over us and we drank it in as much as we were allowed. No time for cameras. Not even enough time for Elvis to retaliate. Just a beautiful outburst of bouncingly playful happiness that was impossible to capture on film. I thought to myself, “I’ll just have to remember this.”

Mike and I taught Sid this trick. He doesn’t do it quite as well as this cat, however. I’ll have to see if we can get him on film.