Pets: The New Girl

L's wanted a dog for a long time. She misses Tigger, her old cat of 22 years who would curl up with her when she slept. Mouse is a great cat, but she's not a cuddly one, and Grendel always curls up at my feet.

L gets very specific ideas about what she wants, and in this case, what she wanted was a miniature Australian Shepherd. She did a bunch of research and found Stoverly Aussies in Midland. We went up to meet with them and their dogs, and L loved the dogs.

We didn't adopt any puppies then -- there were none ready for adoption -- but a week ago L found that Stoverly had posted pictures of two new litters up for adoption. One pup in particular, Quiver, caught L's eye: he had very distinctive markings, and was a very small pup (which suited us).

After getting in touch with Stoverly, we decided not to go with Quiver. Stoverly wanted to keep him on a co-own for breeding purposes, which would have been very awkward with the two-hour drive between Toronto and Midland. Still, L was also taken with a couple of the other pups, Usher (a male) and Cheerio (a female), so we arranged to visit Stoverly on Saturday.

After driving through a nasty white-out in Barrie, we arrived at Stoverly and met all the pups, who were racing all 'round the house. After we'd been there a while, one of the other females, Jolly, curled up on L's lap and fell asleep, and that clinched it -- we ended up taking Jolly home.

We got back to Toronto and stopped at PetSmart to pick up a crate, a pen, some toys, and so on -- and had a great deal of trouble getting out of the store because people kept stopping to ask about her.

Once home, we got things set up and put her food down in her pen, but she was too excited to eat. We took her outside, but since she hadn't eaten, she didn't need to go -- and it was cold!

Eventually we retired to the bedroom to catch up on our CSI episodes, with the new girl -- we're not going to go with "Jolly", but we have to come up with a name of our own -- curled up on L and snoozing through them all. After the shows, she went into her crate with a minimum of fuss and sleep through 'til I got up at 7am.

Next up: photos, and day 2.