Gabby

I'm not sure if it started when our old dog, Maggie, died, or when I went to college. Either way, our old dog died an old dog about two years earlier, and despite my begging, they flat out refused to get another dog. Mostly, it was my mom who was doing the refusing.
Then one day my dad announced that they were getting a new dog. I was slightly shocked, and rather miffed. Here they were finally doing what I had been asking them to do for years,f barely 4 weeks after I left for school. They said she would be named Gabrielle, (Gabby for short) and she would be black like Maggie was. They knew the details, now they just had to search the shelters until they found her.

After a decent period of looking, they found her. She was the only dog who wasn't jumping around, barking and generally going nuts when they came in. My dad and sister looked at each other and said, that's her. She was (still is) a black lab/pit bull mix, but the brindled fur on the inside of her legs and face suggests some rottweiler or boxer. They guessed she was around a year old, but labs never really grow up, so it's hard to tell.

Turns out she had been a stray and therefore had absolutely no manners whatsoever. They brought her in the house, and she stood on the kitchen table, ran around like a lunatic, chewed shoes, furniture and anything else she could find and generally acted exactly the opposite of why they'd picked her.

Since then (almost two years) we've (mostly they've) been training and fighting with her, and it's actually really starting to show. She's a lot better behaved now than then, and she has a personality. She's dumb but nowhere near stupid, and she acts like no other dog I've ever met.
She loves people, but hates other dogs. She likes to walk, run, eat, sleep, play and loves to swim. And she doesn't like having her picture taken. Mostly she doesn't like ot sit still long enough. These first three are frame captures from video that my dad took to send to me when they first got her.

These next two are stills from video that I took this past spring. We went for a hike in the Pine Barrens and took the dog with us. We came to a decent sized stream. Gabby really wanted to swim, so we let her. She has a flair for the dramatic, and likes to make noise either by throwing plastic things or bones down the steps, or deliberately banging into things. She discovered very quickly that she could make a big splash by jumping into the water, so she did. Click the pic on the left to watch it. Same as the OMS video, you need QuickTime.

For reasons known only to her, she decided to climb onto this log that was in the middle of the stream. Parts of the stream were shallow enough for her to stand in, and she knew that. She wasn't trying to not drown, she was just determined. I apologize for the crappy sound quality of us laughing and cheering her on. And for the bouncing. She had already fallen off once, so I just grabbed my camera and hit record. I had to zoom in pretty far to make it
After she jumps off, starts to swim back to us and the clip ends, she detours over to the little island. She grabs a big chunk of branch that somebody had thrown for her to bring back earlier, and brings it back with her. At the time she was preoccupied with getting on the log, and we didn't think she'd even seen it.

I managed to take a few pictures of her this afternoon. She likes to lay on her back when she's chewing on something, holding it between her paws. It looks like a seal eating a clam or fish or whatever they eat. She also sleeps on her back like that, with her head hanging off the couch.

I took some more footage recently. The one on the left is her jumping to catch this toy on a rope. She's got mad ups. The one on the right is her being spastic with an old plastic bottle. The junk on the floor is stuff she knocked off in her insanity before I had a chance to get the camera going.

When Gabby's outside, we have to clip her collar to a cable tie that's attached to a post in the middle of the yard. We don't have a fence, and she's crazy, so this is the next best thing. She has a doghouse out there, and a few trees, but there's also an old porch swing that we hung between the two trees. She likes to climb up there and swing in the breeze, but if you come to the door, and she sees you, she'll jump off. So I had to hide to take this picture.