An Unexpected Guest

An interesting thing happened yesterday.  I went on my daily run to a park about two miles from my house.  There was no one else in the park except for me and the workers mowing the grass.  On my third lap around the park, I ran into a big chocolate lab lumbering along all by himself in the grass.  I stopped to say hi and pet him for a second assuming his owner was probably watching him from the backyard of one of the houses that backs up to the park.  But when I came around for my fourth lap, the dog was still wandering around by himself with no owners to be seen.  He recognized me and came bounding over to say hi.  I stopped to pet him, but when I started running again, he ran right along next to me.  He stayed with me for my entire last lap and as I got ready to leave the park and head home, it didn't seem like he had any intention of staying behind.  I tried to stop and read the tag on his collar, but he was too excited about continuing our jog and just trotted up ahead of me so I kept running thinking I would call the owners when he got tired of running alongside me.  I figured this wouldn't take long since this dog didn't seem to be in the best of shape.  Even his back jiggled back and forth as he ran.  But this dog didn't give up that easily.  He followed me up hills, across streets, through a construction zone, all the way home!  I couldn't believe that this big fat dog kept up with me for 3 miles!  He started to run out of steam towards the end, but he made it.  I hesitated for a second to bring him in the house since I was sure Jeff wouldn't approve (he was at school) and we're not allowed to have pets in there, but the poor dog was really huffing and puffing so I had to bring him in for some water.  I was sure to use my bowl to give him water and assured Jeff of that later.  Then I called the number on his tag, but it turned out to be a very old tag from an animal shelter in Spanish Fork.  So old, that they no longer had the ID number in their system.  They told me that I could either drive the dog to Spanish Fork or call Provo animal control to come pick him up.  I decided that if the owners were looking for him, they would call animal control to see if they had picked him up so I figured that would be the best option since I had no way of finding the owners myself.  I called animal control and they said they'd come get him as soon as they could.  I was supposed to be getting in the shower since my old roommate, Melissa was coming to visit in a little over an hour, but I couldn't leave the dog (who I decided looked like a Luke) unsupervised in my house, so instead we watched The Rookie and played catch with Jeff's Apple Jacks cereal until he got picked up.  Jeff didn't mind too much.  It was so much fun to have a dog around again.  I miss him already.

As you can see, he's just a little soggy around the midsection so you can understand why I was so impressed he ran 3 whole miles.  He was breathing pretty hard for a good 10 minutes afterwards while he laid on the kitchen floor trying to cool off

best friends

He liked those Apple Jacks

Jeff was so nice to share