Enter Blue Dog, September 2007

By the time August of 2007 rolled around, I was two months away from getting married and we were feverishly working on getting our 1920's mill house ready for human inhabitants. Not to mention the animal inhabitants.

Daisy, of course, would be coming with me. Ellison, my future husband, was bringing no animals to the table. That was okay, though. In addition to Daisy I was bringing three guinea pigs and a ridiculously large, handmade cage, and two parakeets. All of these were rescues and could certainly not be left behind at my dad's house. My convoluted menagerie must come with!

With all of that, what makes a seemingly sane person say, "Wow, honey. Since we're moving into a 1200 square foot house with one dog, three guinea pigs, and two parakeets, we should adopt a Great Dane!"

We haven't quite figured it out yet, but we're glad we did it.

We didn't have any particular requirements for this rescue other than it get along with Daisy. And by get along, I mean that it flees in terror when she snarls at it, as opposed to eating her for a snack.

We found a Great Dane rescue close to us and in late August, we went to meet some Danes. The people at Mid-Atlantic Great Dane Rescue League were awesome. After Daisy barked her fool head off at the North Carolina coordinator for about 30 minutes we met a few Danes. A few of them were clearly upset (read, angry) by Daisy's snarls and some of them merely raised their hackles at her. One Great Dane, after moving to sniff Daisy's butt, recoiled in horror when my Little White Dog reared up and attempted to snap at him. He ran clear across the horse pasture and jumped into a water trough.

We decided he was the one. We told them we would be back on September 1st to pick him up because we were moving into our house that day. They had already inspected our new house and our fence and were fine with keeping Sully for two more weeks.

When we finally spent the first night in our house, we woke up on September 1st, drove back to North Carolina, and got to pick up our new baby. He was waiting for us. We brought a new collar that was adorned with an autumn leaf pattern and a new tag with our phone number on it. The rescue worker gave Sully a big bear hug (because you can do that with a dog that big) and leashed him for us.

After we were pulled around the yard a bit, we finally managed to grab onto the mirror of our car and wait until he realized he would need to get in it. Before we could open the door, Sully jumped ONTO the car.

Wondering what we had gotten into, we finally got him off the hood and loaded him in properly. We closed the door and I stared at my husband-to-be for a moment. The car was rocking frantically back and forth as Sully paced in the back seat. Without saying anything, we got in our respective sides of the car and backed down the driveway. Sully stared out the back window watching his foster dad fade into the distance.

He finally settled down and laid across the seat as best as he could. I patted his feet and played with his paw pads. I distinctly remember saying, "Look, honey! I'll have no trouble giving him nail trims!"

Sully dozed softly until we pulled up to a Wendys. We were starved and all three of us shared some nuggets once they found someone who wasn't scared to reach through the drive-thru window and hand them to us...