For most of my life, I\u2019ve been involved with big dogs.\u00a0 As newlyweds in the sixties we had Huck, a blue tick hound; Sunny, a border collie; and Zeke a black and tan hound of no particular heritage.\u00a0 Those dogs perished together in a car wreck when the driver suffered a seizure and overturned the pickup truck in which they were riding.\u00a0 To say I was devastated is putting it mildly.\u00a0 Barney was a black lab who showed up on our doorstep in Phoenix and stayed.\u00a0 Actually his owner showed up with a rope and took him back, but Barney escaped and made the five mile return trip through downtown Phoenix.\u00a0 That time I didn\u2019t bother calling his owner.\u00a0 It seemed to me that Barney had made a choice and that was that.<\/p>\n
Once Bill and I married, big dogs became the order the the day.\u00a0 Golden retrievers, dominated\u2014Nikki and Tess, Aggie and Daph.\u00a0 There was the six-month retirement haven we offered to a platinum golden named Mandy and the half German shepherd\/Irish wolfhound named Boney who was with us for eleven wonderful years.\u00a0 Some of Boney\u2019s history is reflected in the Rambo\/Lucy character in my recent Beaumont book, Proof of Life.\u00a0 As many of you already suspect, I\u2019m sometimes too lazy to make up everything in my books, so I take a few pages from real life here and there.<\/p>\n
So I was a big dog person.\u00a0 Not surprisingly, some of that real life big dog prejudice leaked into my fiction.\u00a0 Beau, especially, didn\u2019t care for small dogs and referred to them alternately as \u201cyappy little dogs\u201d or else as WOFs–Wastes of Fur.<\/p>\n
But here\u2019s the thing, somewhere out in the great beyond, Someone is always listening\u2014Someone with a sense of humor.\u00a0 So eight years ago, when my daughter, grandson and I found a WOF abandoned in the street, we had to take her home.\u00a0 And then we fell in love.\u00a0 At the time we found Bella, a longhaired miniature dachshund, she weighed a mere seven pounds when she should have weighed ten.\u00a0 Naturally she wormed her way into our lives\u2014and into our bed and even into my book tours.\u00a0 And when she showed up at signings, people were quick to remind me, \u201cHey, wait a minute.\u00a0 Isn\u2019t that the kind of dog you used to call a WOF?\u201d\u00a0 Yup, guilty as charged!<\/p>\n
So Bella introduced us to the wonderfulness of small dogs.\u00a0 Jojo came into our lives two and a half years ago, and Mary showed up last September.\u00a0 Both are long-haired miniature dachshunds and yes, both are very much \u201cyappy little dogs.\u201d<\/p>\n
Today we have workers at the house here in Tucson\u2014a guy from Cox is replacing our old modem with a new one, and the yard guys are outside mowing and blowing.\u00a0 And both dogs are busy pitching their yappy little fit.<\/p>\n
Yes, somewhere Someone was listening to everything I said and wrote.<\/p>\n
And Karma is a bitch!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
For most of my life, I\u2019ve been involved with big dogs.\u00a0 As newlyweds in the sixties we had Huck, a blue tick hound; Sunny, a border collie; and Zeke a black and tan hound of no particular heritage.\u00a0 Those dogs perished together in a car wreck when the driver suffered a seizure and overturned the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1529","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3nsBA-oF","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1529","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1529"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1529\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1530,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1529\/revisions\/1530"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1529"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1529"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1529"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}