Crashing Computers & Guardian Dogs

Been trying to blog for the last few nights but my damned computer keeps crashing....

Can not afford to get it fixed till maybe next week or maybe the week after as Tanky boy has to go and see his Doctor next week. We have discovered a couple of bogus lumps on his shoulders that we want to have checked out as soon as we can. We lost our very first Dobermann Zara to cancer so we are pretty vigilant with lumps and bumps on the dogs...

Which brings me to my guardian dog Zara. She was a red Dobermann from the wrong side of the tracks, literally. I wanted my own dog as Andrew had a beautiful German Shephard, Sasha, when I met him. I had always wanted a red Dobermann after seeing a photo of one when I was a kid but when we were looking at puppies for me there were none around. In the end I settled on a blue healer pup, put down the deposit and then in the week I had to wait to collect it, there in the newspaper was the ad for red Dobermann puppies!!!!! Sorry blue pup, HAD to have a red one!!!

So we travelled to the wrong side of the railway tracks to a very unsavory looking house and a garage full of red puppies, I wanted them all!!! In the end we picked up the biggest girl and took Miss Zara home.

She was a total fruit loop!!! Total!!! She wrecked everything in sight, I came home one day to find every one of my daughters stuffed toys ripped into tiny pieces and Dacron spread like snow over the whole backyard - Sasha just pointed at Zara and sighed!

The next week I came home and found Zara hanging by one leg through a huge hole in my queen size sheet, she was slowly walking on three legs round and round the clothes line.... Sasha just raised an eybrow and sighed....

She ate all the grapes off the vine while they were green, obviously having never read that they were poisonous to dogs. She dug holes, never walked on a lead without almost choking to death. She would leap from a sound snoring sleep and dash barking in full voice outside, running through everything at a thousand miles an hour of noise, Sasha would look at us and silently shake her wise German Shephard head and then sigh...

Zara would not sleep at night unless she was tucked into the space behind my knees under the blankets in bed, she drove us crazy to the point of almost going to the vets and not coming back.... She was just impossible to live with...

And then one day she limped. We thought it was a stone bruise on her foot but after a week she was still limping, still digging holes, still wrecking everything in site, still barking like a banshee but limping....

We took her to see her Uncle Craig the vet and he did a couple of xrays, we waited and were told she was limping because she had bone cancer throughout her body, he said she was in extreme pain but that she wouldn't show it because dogs were too loyal to let pain stop them being with the ones they loved... we had to say goodbye to Zara right then, it was too sudden..... and then it seemed impossible to live without her....

We searched till we found two girl Dobermanns, Leto and Hera were half sisters, both black and tan from the right side of the tracks, our first show dogs.... Sasha almost threw herself under a train when they arrived!

About 4 years later I went to see a psychic who I had never met before, the person who introduced me never knew I had owned a red Dobermann... As I walked into her house I was greated by her dogs and as I bent to pat them the lady turned to me and said - Ohhh isn't she just lovely... your red dog, I have never seen one like her, is she a red Dobermann? She loves you very much and will always be at your side.

I still can only sleep when I can bend my knees to make a space...