1. Describe an amazing heirloom in your possession.
2. What is your favorite family recipe (and a great memory that you have associated with it)?
3. What is your favorite memory with a great-uncle?
4. What is one of your funniest (or silliest) memories of a cousin?
5. Throwback Thursday - write about a blast from the past.
6. Tell a story about your first pet. How did you get this pet? How did you choose its name?
7. What was your favorite childhood toy and why?
I'm not sure I had ever been more excited or anxious in my life than I was that Friday, October 15, 2010. I couldn't wait for my shift at the writing center to be over. I had a plan in place: finish work, go to the bank get money, and go north. I was going to pick up a friend from her and we were on our way to Ralls, Texas - a tiny town somewhere near Lubbock, I thought - so that I could look at puppies. I'd seen the advertisement in the paper earlier that week, and when I'd called the old farmer told me that he had a litter that was ready. I'd been wanting a puppy for such a long time. I'd researched the kind of dog I wanted for over a year. I thought that I would adopt an adult dog - I was starting graduate school in the fall of 2010, and as I told my mother then, "A puppy is like a baby and I definitely don't need that right now." The adult dog I thought that I was going to get escaped the yard he was being kept in (all the way in East Texas), was hit by a car, and died. He'd been such a sweet, sweet dog. I kept looking and looking, waiting for the perfect rescue or puppy opportunity. That day I looked in the classifieds, I knew in my bones that this was it. |
We began the venture back home, an eight-week old baby sleeping on my lap - stretched from my knees to my hips. I threw names around. Angus? No, he didn't look like an Angus. Merlin? No, that didn't seem to fit. Bran? No. Cash? No. Nelson? Nope. Odin? He was going to be friends with a lab named "Thor" - so maybe Odin? No, no that wasn't going to work either. Wait! I had it. I liked the name Orson. Orson was perfect, it meant "little bear" and he definitely looked like a little bear. I got home, made a dog tag for sweet baby Orson. Introduced him to my parents, and started training him...and couldn't remember his name to save my life. What was I calling this puppy again? Every time I opened my mouth a different name would come out - Bronson. Well, that definitely wasn't Orson. I went back to the store and had a new dog tag made for "Bronson" and that's been my best friend's name ever since. |