Lindsy turns 14 this month. We don’t know the exact day as she was a rescue but it’s some time this month. She’s slowed down a lot and is having trouble getting up, and a few weeks ago she cracked a tooth, but other than that she’s doing more or less OK. Well, unless you count being deaf and a bit senile. Fourteen is pretty old for a dog her size. She celebrated with a peanut butter cup treat from Waggers Dog Depot, some sort of nasty tendon chewy thing, and some fancy canned food.

Lindsy in the yard

Cricket got to celebrate along with her because her ‘birthday’ went kind of unremarked last month; since she was older when we got her we have no idea when she was actually born so we just count her birthday as the day we got her. As to how old she is, that one is anyone’s guess. When we got her in 2005 the people who dropped her off at the SPCA said she was three… but there was a bit of a language barrier. The vet who saw her a few weeks later estimated “at least ten” which would make her about fourteen or so now. Toy dogs tend to live a lot longer than larger breeds so she could be even older than that. She’s actually doing pretty good these days, her junk food diet seems to be treating her well.

It’s really weird to see Lindsy as an ‘old lady’… it seems like just yesterday she was young and spry! She and Olive are the last of the original gang of four dogs, five cats, and two snakes that moved with us from Asheville to Tucson, to Dallas, then Hendersonville, then back to Asheville. The others are sort of ‘souvenirs’ from each of those stops; Simon came from a rescue in Tucson, Cricket, as mentioned previously, from the SPCA of Texas, and Winter from a vet clinic where we worked in Hendersonville.

Hmmm… as much mayhem as they cause us some times, I think T-shirts or tacky snow globes of each city would have been better souvenir choices.