My dog Iris

My dog Iris still lives in Chicago of course, with my parents, so technically she's my parents dog, but we got her when I was 16 (nearly 17) so I consider her my dog.

About January when I was 16 y/o we put the family dog 'Jumper' down. He was a 12 or 13 y/o German Shephard mix. Great dog, really wonderful, I still get teary eyed when I think of him :( About six months or so after saying goodbye to Jumper we all decided to go on down to the City Pound and pick out a new family member. Let me tell you, the City Pound is a great/depressing place. There's lots of cute puppies and dogs there, which makes it great, but there's also lots of sad looking dogs that you just know are not going to be around much longer, which of course makes it depressing.

Anyway, after looking around in a bunch of different rooms at all the pups and dogs I stumbled upon this shy looking girl pup. She was giving me that characteristic puppy dog look, just sitting in her cage all sad and lonely looking. She was super cute, the info card on her cage said she was 6 months old "mixed breed", which means MUTT. And she looks like a mutt too, she's got a kind of rotweiller thing going with brown and black face and body, but she's kinda small and her body is shaped almost like a whippet or something. She's got brown legs with black leopard like spots all over them. Those spots are why my dad calls her ugly. But anyway, I saw her and immediately fell in love with her. I went to get my mom and brother to show her off to them. Although my mother had her eye on this goofy looking white dog, he had longish hair and skinny legs. I thought he/she was pretty ugly and not nearly as sweet looking as Iris.

So after about 20 minutes of begging, I finally convinced my mom that Iris was the dog for us. We weren't allowed to take her home right away for some strange reason we had to wait until the next day. Well, I wasn't home when they brought her home, I was probably out with friends or something like that. But that sweet shy dog completely changed her attitude once she found out she was HOME. She was jumping all over everybody and everything, wagging her tail something feirce and licking and it was adorable.

Anyway, Iris is 10 years old now and not nearly as wild and crazy as she once was. She sleeps in my parents bed with them and my father says that in the mornings he's got to drag her by her collar to get her up and down the stairs for her morning pee break and breakfast time, and when she's done with that she's right back in bed with my mom. I love that dog.

When I move into my own house I'm gonna get a dog and I hope it's just like Iris. Although Jumper was a great dog too, and if I could some sort of strange combination of the two, that would be great, thanks.

Sorry, I can't find a picture of her anywhere. She's awesome though.