A while after that she calls me and asks me if I can help as well; the moving was more physically intense than she'd expected and she didn't want to exacerbate a sore hip muscle. So I of course said, sure, I'd love to help. She said she'd call when she was almost back to our house.
She called sooner than I'd expected with the information that there was a dog in the backseat of the car. Not our dog; Suki was hanging out with me at the house. Here's the story:
Carrie was driving up N Proctor, and when she passed N 10th this black dog came running around the corner and started up Proctor. Carrie, being the wonderful person that she is, pulled over to make sure the dog didn't get hit by a car or anything. As she pulled over she noticed a group of people calling, "C'mere!" and motioning for the dog to come to them. So Carrie figured it must be their dog and that they'd take care of everything. So she pulled back out into traffic and continued on.
On the way back down Proctor she noticed the same dog running along the street several blocks up from where she last saw it. It proceeded to run across the street and almost got hit by a white car. So this time Carrie pulls over and gets that dog in the backseat of the car.
So she pulled up to the house with the dog in the front seat of the car (it upgraded its own ticket). It was already wearing a choke chain, so I just brought out a leash. The dog is medium-sized and looks like ¾ Black Lab and ¼ Pit Bull (mostly in the face and the sheer brick-like musculature). Very obviously a boy, probably between 1 and 2 years old.
The three of us drove over to Laura's new apartment, which, although it's in a crappy area of Tacoma (near the ghetto Safeway), it's on a surprisingly nice street in a gorgeous old house. And the apartment has an enormous kitchen! We left the dog in our car and helped Laura move stuff from her truck up to the apartment.
We all headed back to Laura's old house, where I was left to help Laura load the truck with the remnants of her stuff (mattress, box springs, and orange loveseat) while Carrie went back to where she found the dog and started walking around with it to see if it belonged to anybody there (or even if anybody recognized it at all).
So Laura and I trucked her stuff back to her apartment and hauled it up the weirdly narrow stairs. It reminded me of a scene from Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency where a piece of furniture gets stuck on a flight of stairs in such a way that it was actually physically impossible to maneuver it out. That didn't (quite) happen to us.
We finished there and Laura drove me back to my car. I drove and picked up Carrie and the dog. No one had recognized or claimed it. So we loaded it in the car, then picked up Laura at her old house (where she was dropping off the truck) and everyone came back to my house.
The new dog was introduced to Suki (who was scared but still her tail was wagging like crazy). Fantastico fled to my closet the instant the thing came in the house. It was only in the house for a short while before we discovered that the Humane Society closed at 6:00 (it was much later than that). I located the 20-foot tie-out and tied it to a tree in the backyard. Anything that could be moved or knocked over I pushed up against the fence because this dog, though it was really nice and sweet, was kinda like the bull in the China shop.
Once that was done and we were all washed up from moving, the three of us (sans tied-up dog) went to the Parkway for relaxing food and grink. We were joined a while later by Leilani and had a generally good time... until it was time to pay. I went up and paid the tab, and when I got back to the table I realized it seemed kinda high. Carrie noticed they'd charged us for four beers when we'd only had three. So I went back up to the bar to have them correct it and they did, but they were real dicks about it. Both of them were. So that pissed me the hell off.
We took Laura back to her old house so she could collect her truck, then we headed back to our house. For some reason Carrie, bless her sweet heart, wanted the new dog to sleep inside the house when it would have been perfectly fine sleeping under the back porch. Suki wasn't terribly happy about having it in the house, and neither was I. Bull-in-a-China-shop hijynx ensued until Carrie relented to locking it in the bathroom for the night.
Come the morning we had to let it run around while we got ready for work, and at one point while unsupervised it took an enormous, stinky dump on the dining room rug. Fun! We tied it back up in the backyard and headed to work.
When we got home it was still back there, but we noticed that it had almost pushed the back screen door in, apparently in an attempt to get inside (not that it could have gotten past the locked laundry room door). We brought the dog back inside and I fixed the screen, then realized that Fantastico hadn't greeted me when I'd come in the front door (as is her custom). The dog had pushed the screen open just enough to where Fantastico could have gotten out...
So Carrie went looking around the block while I scoured the house. I eventually found her: she'd buried herself under a pile of bedding in the back corner of my closet, and she was shivering with fear. Also, in the span of a few seconds between when I went outside to tell Carrie I'd found the cat and when we came back inside, the dog took another massive dump on the rug. Great!
After eating a delicious lunch of chicken pizzas, we loaded the new dog up in the car and drove it down to the Humane Society. We hoped it had had a microchip implanted in it; it hadn't. So they're going to keep him on reserve for three days and then if he isn't claimed by his owner he'll go into the regular adoption queue. So if anybody in the North End of Tacoma knows anybody who lost a black, male, short-haired dog with a tiny patch of white on its chest, head on down to the Humane Society and pick up your dog! Otherwise some other family will end up with him!
Also, put microchips in your damned pets in case something like this happens!
Carrie has a hard time going to the Humane Society because she's such a softie that she wants to rescue EVERY animal there and always ends up a teary-eyed mess afterwards. Part of why I love her.
So that was not at all the day I was expecting yesterday (or today). But it reminded me of a very Buddhist story I read a long time ago, which I'll paraphrase for you now:
A police officer in Moscow was living a very unhappy life. Every day he'd walk the same beat, and every day he'd see this one man going about his daily routine: at the same time every day this man would cheerfully walk to the store and buy groceries, then walk back home. Well, one day the cop was feeling particularly miserable about being stuck walking the same beat every day, and the man's cheerfulness only made the cop feel more sullen. So the cop, being an A-hole, decided to harass the man.
As the man was cheerfully walking to the grocery store, the cop approached and asked, "Hey, buddy, where are you going?"
The man cheerfully shrugged and said, "I don't know."
The cop was taken aback: "What do you mean you don't know?"
"I have no idea where I'm going," the man clarified.
This pissed the cop off. "Every day I see you at the same time walk to the grocery store, and now you're telling me you don't know where you're going!?"
"That's exactly what I'm saying."
So this cop, thinking that the man was purposefully lying to him, threatened to arrest him if he didn't tell him where he was going. The man just repeated that he had no idea where he was going. So the cop cussed him out, slapped him into handcuffs, and hauled him off to jail.
After locking him in the jail cell, the cop said, "What do you have to say for yourself now?"
The man cheerfully replied, "You see? When I headed out this morning I had no idea I would be going to go to jail."
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