Poodles

We have a little poodle.

He is my third poodle.

His name is Ripley Saint Jude & he is white, although these days much of his fur has worn off and his skin underneath is spotted black, like a holstein cow.
In this photo, Freya has crammed all the sofa pillows, her bottle, Onkel, and the dog into the space behind the chair.

Ripley mostly hangs out with our housemate, which is really silly, since I am the poodle person.

Rolf didn't even like dogs until he met me & Teddy my apricot poodle.

Ted Braun was my second poodle.

He was a really bad dog that liked to bite people, drink beer and bark a lot. He cost me a fortune by biting a lawyer. For years I had to register him as a "Dangerous Animal" with animal control, but I loved him dearly enough to go into credit card debt.

I got him in 1988, from one of those awful puppy mills, you read about. He was their stud.
What a rotten life he had, locked up in a cage in a dim basement. I wouldn't have taken him at all, had I not felt guilty about leaving him in such ratty conditions. His name was JJ, when I got him, but I decided to name him after my best childhood friend's dad, and add a family name. He was so traumatized, the name change didn't phase him in the least.

Teddy lived with me and my college housemate Jackie, in a really rundown railroad flat downtown. He loved to sit in the front window and bark at people. He would escape once in a while and race down Broadway Dr. headed for PSU, stopping along the way to snap at people and nip a leg when he could.

When I decided to move in with my current housemate, in 1990, I had some concerns about the dog, but Rolf fell in love with Ted and pretty soon it was like he wasn't even my pet anymore!
When Ted died in 2001, we got Ripley from a poodle rescue. Straight away it was obvious that this dog was no Teddy.

Ripley is as timid and shy as you can imagine and he has never once even snapped at anyone, not even Freyja when she pulls his tail and carries him around.

My first poodle was Puppo a medium sized miniture poodle with gray fur. I got him from a lady that had found him at a gas station, where he had been throw out of a car. She nursed him back to health and put an ad in the paper "free to good home".

I was dealing, poorly, with the break up from my high school boyfriend, and moping around the house. I had, had to move back in with my mother, I was working for aging services checking on mentally ill people in their homes and going to college at night - things were just generally grim. My mother suggested a dog, to lift my spirits and keep me busy, so I looked in the paper and knew instantly that I had to have this particular dog, since the dog was a poodle, and the lady giving him away lived in the Trinity apartments, in NW.
I loved poodles and I loved those apartments.

Surely it was a sign from god.

So off I went in my 1977 Datsun B-210 and picked up Puppo.
He jumped up on the dash behind the backseat and away we went.
I adored that dog and took him everywhere I went, in a wicker basket/purse.
He only lived two years but he was an excellent friend.