Day 23 – Dog chaser

We have a new dog at our house. We adopted Cody on December 13, 2020. It was kind of an impulse, but my husband and I both had been thinking about getting a second dog for quite some time. Boomer, our other dog, has been with us for five years. He’s a really good dog.

The new dog, Cody, is a year and a half old and still very much a puppy. He likes to chew things. Random things. He likes to chew things that he didn’t chew yesterday but all of a sudden decides he wants to chew them today. We are trying to teach him right from wrong, just like any responsible pet owner. Included in that is going outside in the yard to do his business without having to be on a leash. We’ve been working on this quite a bit more now that the weather has gotten nicer. My son is usually in charge of taking him out, but Sunday afternoon he was at baseball practice, so I was on Cody duty.

I let him out in the yard without a leash and he did his business right away, and continued to sniff around. Little did I realize there was a family walking down the sidewalk taking an afternoon stroll. Cody spotted them and took off like a shot across the street and over to the people. I ran after him, calling him, but he didn’t come to me. Instead, he ran back across the street to the other side of our house. My husband and I split up, one of us on each side of the house, but apparently we were not fast enough. He disappeared.

I immediately ran inside to grab his leash, and leashed up the other dog, knowing that Cody would come over to Boomer. As we started out the front of the house, we could not see Cody anywhere.

So I started walking. Or shall I say, I tried to keep up with Boomer! Let’s just say that Boomer is not real great on a leash! Normally, when walking him anywhere, he wears an anti-pull harness. I did not take the time to put that on him in my haste to get out searching for Cody. So I was really being dragged down the sidewalk by Boomer. We raced through the entire neighborhood, asking anyone who was outside their homes, walking down the street, pulling into their driveways in their cars, and even asked moms and their kids at the park if they had seen our medium sized, friendly, black dog. In the meantime, my husband was in his truck canvassing the whole entire neighborhood, as well as the subdivision next to ours. Cody was nowhere to be found.

Forty-five minutes later, my husband calls me, “I’ve got him.“ Next, my obvious question, “Where was he?“ “IN John’s house.”

John is our neighbor. Our next-door neighbor. Apparently, when my husband and I both ran to the front of the house looking for Cody, he ran to the back of the house and up the back steps of John’s house. We did not see him standing at the top of the stairs looking into the patio door of John’s house! Why John didn’t call us right away, still remains a question to be answered. All’s well that ends well, right?!

When I woke up Monday morning, I couldn’t figure out why my shins were so sore. Then I remembered: the tour of the neighborhood! I guess I really am getting old!