Oh, There's More...

Just having a flooded car wasn't enough to make yesterday go down in history as one of the Top 5 crappiest days I've ever had.

After dealing with all of the car stress, Kaeli and I went inside to clean up and try to relax a little bit. Up until this point, our dog, Maverick had been seriously neglected because so much was going on. We put his leash on, and took him for a nice walk.

Things were going just fine. The sun had come out, and all of roads had dried up. Quite frankly, unless you had spent your morning trying to salvage your car, it was a pretty day.

I noticed a couple of kids petting a dog that wasn't on a leash. I thought nothing of it until the rather large dog started CHARGING my 11lb. poodle mix. I told Kaeli to get away, and I tried to pick up Maverick before the dog could get to him, but the mean dog was too fast. He's barking and trying to bite Maverick, Mav is trying to get out of the way, and I'm trying, in vain, to get my little dog off of the ground to safety. The next thing I know, mean dog has a hold of Mav's tail and Kaeli is watching and FREAKING OUT. I'm trying to scare the dog away, but it's not working. Maverick manages to wiggle out of his collar (since I still have the leash) and take off running towards home. In hindsight, I guess I could have let go of the leash and let Maverick go running right away, but I kept picturing mean dog chasing him down and hurting him since I wouldn't have been there to protect Maverick. Finally, the mean dog runs the other way. I get Kaeli and Maverick into the apartment, and go looking for mean dog's owners.

The mean dog is chilling in the grass, and the kids are petting him. They don't know who's dog it is. In fact, no one in the whole complex knows who owns this dog. The kids totally ignored me when I said that they probably should be more careful around it. He seemed okay around people, but they had just watched what he tried to do to my dog. It didn't seem to phase the kids at all.

He had a collar, but I wasn't going to get close enough to look. I'm assuming that he got out of someone's yard. I was going to call animal control or something, so that they could handle the issue, but then the dog disappeared.

Thankfully, Maverick seems ok. As soon as we got into the apartment he was wagging is tail. I checked him for puncture wounds, but I don't think the mean dog ever got a good grip on him. Maverick is little, but he's scrappy.

I walked away from it the most injured. I have a huge burn from when the retractable leash wrapped around my arm during the dog rescuing efforts. Not to mention that now I'm totally terrified to take Maverick out for a walk. I'm also rethinking the retractable leash idea.

Maverick has always driven me a little crazy. He has destroyed my shoe collection, chewed up Kaeli's toys, and, when he gets really mad at me, he urinates in his crate and rolls in it so that he's completely soaked in dog piss. Then, as I was petting him and showering him with extra attention last night, I realized that I would be devastated if something ever happened to him. As annoying as he can be, he has firmly implanted himself as part of this family. I don't want to wish bad things on an animal, but I seriously hate that other dog for even coming near Mav.

The whole incident probably lasted a minute, but it was a seriously long minute. Like a slow motion minute that was just icing on the cake of one of the longest days ever.