Molly (1984-1987) and Buck (1984-1987): Molly is the brown one, Buck is the black lab. My parents got Molly when they first got the house, and a couple months after that they got Buck. Molly was the mischievous dog, and was always escaping the caged area in our backyard. Buck was the nice dog, very sweet.
Here's a picture of Molly and Buck playing (with each other and my dad, who isn't pictured):
Molly and Buck hoping for a treat:
Sadly, Molly taught Buck how to dig. They escaped one day and killed some rabbits (that were in the front yard of a neighbor's house. My dad had to give them up for adoption, because he didn't want them around us. I was just over a year old when they were taken away. A couple years ago in the newspaper I saw an ad for an animal shelter. The dog pictured was an 18 year old dog named "Molly."
My dad didn't want to get anymore dogs after that (he had already been through many as a kid himself). However, my sister was only a few months old and I was too young to remember them except through video recordings and pictures (the ones above are the first I've ever seen of them). One night someone snuck into our backyard and stole something off our pool. That prompted him (well, that and my constant begging for a dog) to get:
Megan (1993-2003)
We got her from an animal shelter when she was only a couple months old. She's a mix of a German Sheppard and we're not sure what else. She was a great watchdog when we lived in Fontana (fierce when she needed to be, and affectionate when she needed to be). She was a great companion in the city we currently live in (which was, pretty much her retirement. We got her a big dog pillow to sleep on, and she mostly rested indoors, but still patrolled at night, ever watchful).
In September of 2003, I had gone to pick my sister up from school, and realized I was about an hour early. In the twenty minute period of time I'd left, she had had a heart attack (we didn't know what was wrong with her at the time). She didn't respond to "walk" (her ears usually perked up and she'd start whining and running), she wouldn't drink, she wouldn't eat. So we took her to an emergency pet hospital where we found out she had a large heart. They said they'd watch her for the night and make sure she'd be okay. They said she wouldn't be able to go on walks anymore because of the stress on her heart.
The next day my dad called in at 5:00 AM to pick her up. At 6:30 AM he told us that Megan had had another heart attack, and my mom said "she's gone."
A couple weeks later the place mailed her collar and leash back to us. The final notes read:
4:35: collapsed
4:37: unable to resuscitate
It was pretty devastating for all of us. Probably for my dad, the most. She was his dog, and he was the one who played with her pretty much every day (we used to have a huge backyard in Fontana, which gave her a long ways to run whenever they played fetch), and fed her pretty much every day (not meaning he wouldn't feed her, meaning sometimes one of us would).
Well, we said we wouldn't get another dog that day, but on the weekend they sat us down and asked if we'd like to get another dog. We went to the animal shelter and found...
Buddy (born in 2002 [adopted in 2003] - present): Now, we weren't planning to get a dog that day, and after an hour of looking around, we'd found this little yapper named Brownie, and this puppy that looked like Megan did that had no name. The whole time we had ignored this one dog standing quiet with his nose through one of the wholes in the chain link fence (though at the time we thought he was a she). We were interested because he was quiet, he was affectionate, he was named Buddy and was skinny (my deceased grandfather was always very thin, and his nickname was Buddy since he was very little), and his ears perked up on "walk" like Megan's did. So we adopted him that day, and he turned out to be a great dog.
From last Christmas:
Buddy with a new toy:
Chewing:
On his back, playing:
And that's it as far as dogs go.
