December 29th - 26 to 19

Gelert is found!

Tieraney spent the morning making calls and visiting pounds. I drove around with Sophie for a while before her annual doctor check-up. No luck. We're told that people who find huskies often don't turn them in, they keep them, and I find this oddly comforting. It's easier for me to deal with this under the belief that Gelert has been taken in by someone instead of lying dead on the road.

But then, come 5:00 or so, there's a knock on my garage door. I see a black pick up outside, and the whole way to the door, I'm thinking, "They have my dog." The guy at the door asks the question, "Do you know anyone with a white huskie?" I say, "Yeah, that's me." He laughs. "You're kidding. This is the first house I stopped at."

Here's the story. This fellow, Ernie, lives across the street from my sublet, right night to the Jehovah's Witness church, at which he's pointed a canon, perhaps oblivious to the symbolism. Big property with a pond in front of the house and a huge backyard / wooded area. Monday, Ernie and his wife heard howling all night long, which they believed to be a coyote (plausible, as Tieraney and I saw one in our back yard this year). When the howling was still going on Tuesday morning, they decided to check it out. Behind their shed, about 40 feet deep in the woods, they found Gelert. She'd wrapped her chain around a tree, and was stuck there.

Ernie and wife took Gelert back to their garage, gave her food and water, and eventually started their hunt, which quickly found me.

So, my dumbass dog spent around 15 hours--overnight in 15 degree weather and steady snowfall--in the woods (as Sophie would later say, "She must be very brave."). But now she's home, and is showing no ill effects of her adventure. In fact, when she got back inside, she took a quick drink, went outside to pee, then fell asleep under my computer desk for the rest of the night. We celebrated by shoving her in her crate and going out to dinner at Red Lobster. Welcome home, Gelert!

This is when Sam told me, "I told you she was at the neighbor's. I told you." And he had. He kept telling us that Gelert was at the neighbor's behind a red barn, barking. Great. Thanks for the help, Sam. If he'd said she was behind a shed, howling, maybe that wouldn't have been so useless.

And then the Wild lost to the fucking Ducks of Anaheim.

Life tries to go deep, we make the pick.

My ball. 1st and 10 on my own 34.