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I hope everyone had a great weekend! Our Sunday was pretty eventful, and muddy. I spent the morning cooking food for us and photographing a new recipe that will be posted up this week. Then, in the afternoon we drove down to Academy to buy me a bike! My husband was able to fix his, and we would like to start riding together on the weekends. I forgot how much I enjoyed cruising around on a bicycle. We figured it would be a fun way for us to get some active-recovery together on Sundays. The bike we got is nothing super special, but it’s great for me right now. I was excited to try it out. But on the way home it started raining again. 🙁
When we got home, I opened my car door to exit and was immediately greeted by a dog who jumped right into the car and onto my lap. Like, as soon as I opened the car door. I didn’t have any time to think, there was suddenly a medium-sized dog in my car. She was super excited and clearly wanted to play. She started prancing around in our yard and up and down the street in front of our house. I looked around and couldn’t see anyone besides the kids across the street outside. I hadn’t ever seen her before, so I had no clue where she belonged. But from the looks of it, she wasn’t heading home and really wanted to hang around us. I stayed outside with her for a few more minutes glancing up and down the street to see if anyone was looking for her, but no one came, and she was muddy. It started to rain a little, and once we were able to get her to sit still for a moment (she was really excited), we were able to look at her tags. Her name was Jude, and there was a phone number listed. I called the number, but no one answered. So I left a message stating that Jude was running around our street, letting them know where I was and my phone number.
We didn’t feel good leaving her alone to find her way home. She could have escaped from somewhere, or someone could have abandoned her. And I would feel terrible if she ended up getting run over because she couldn’t find her way home. I figured she lived somewhere close, but we had no way of knowing for sure. It was already almost 5pm on a Sunday, so most animal shelters were closed. We decided to put her in our backyard and wait for the owner to call us back.
The rain started coming down harder and I didn’t want her out in the rain without any shelter (we don’t have any type of shelter in our backyard), so we moved her to our garage and I hung out with her in there while we tried to figure out what to do with her. I had never dealt with a lost pet before, so I was posting in the lost animal Facebook pages and looking up Animal Control and the local animal shelters. Jude just stayed close by me. She was quite friendly and really wanted to play. We had a bag of dog food that we had got from PaleoFX, so we gave her some of that (since we had no use for it anyway) and a bowl of water. We had no way of knowing whether she had been lost for a while or if she had eaten. She happily gulped down both.
Finally, the owner texted David back and said that she was out of town and her boyfriend was looking after Jude, and that she must have somehow gotten out. She said she would try to see if she had someone who could come by and get her. I kept playing tug-of-war with Jude while we waited to hear back. The owner said her roommate was not home and could not come to get her yet, but we could leave Jude in her backyard until someone got there to let her in. Her house was just a few doors down from ours. We took Jude back to her own backyard, and within a few minutes we figured out how she had escaped. Apparently, the rain had made it very easy for her to dig a hole in the mud in low area under the fence. She was back out just a couple of minutes after we had put her back in. David ran to our house to see if we had anything we could barricade the hole with while I tried to keep Jude on the opposite side of the fence, getting very muddy in the process. He came back with a few of the landscape bricks that our home’s previous owners left in the backyard, and we were able to block up the hole enough to where she couldn’t get out again. We let the owner know, and she was very thankful, and her roommate was on her way home to let her inside.
I’m glad Jude is home safe now! She was a very sweet and friendly dog… just very playful and curious. We got home and took a long, hot shower to get all of the dirt and mud off of us. What an exciting day!
The rain did let up a little and I was able to ride my bike down to get the mail so I could at least test it out. It took me a minute to get used to riding again, I don’t remember when I last rode a bike. It has to have been at least 7 years or so. It was easy to remember though. I forgot how much fun it was! David is looking into getting a bike rack for the car so we can take them to parks, and we have plans next weekend (weather permitting) to ride down to the tea-house a few miles down the road where we like to get our bubble teas. I’m looking forward to future weekend rides!
I will have a couple of great recipes coming this week! Here is a preview of what you will have to look forward to:
Stay tuned later this week!
