Chronicles of Maya

So, I have this dog... She is (as far as we can tell) a german shepherd/black lab/rottweiler, and may have a little greyhound thrown in there--this chesty broad is the fastest dog at the dog park. She is almost 2 years old. but, she is not just a dog. Maya may very well be the love of my life. I don't have kids, and I refuse to acknowledge any sort of, ahem, biological clock...so Maya is my baby. I'm starting to understand that this may be a sickness.

I refer to her as "the baby" and 65 of the 71 photos in my iPhone are of Maya in various poses. Don't get me wrong--this is a pretty well trained pooch, but we may have ruined her. She has adopted human mannerisms, she uses her paws like hands, whines when she can't sit on the couch with us...and she's no dainty lass, my little lap baby weighs about 75 pounds.

The she-beast has the bark of a mastiff. Luckily, she doesn't use the bark that often. It scares me, and half the neighborhood--which is pretty handy for us, as we live in "not the nicest neighborhood" in Seattle. The dog is a tub of love, and normally, when she's barking at passersby, she is also wagging--she thinks that everyone wants to pet her/let her sit on their laps....but all people hear or see is this black, german shepherd/rottweiler-esque dog with the loudest, meanest bark on the planet. She says, "Yeah, you want to come pet me?" and they hear, "Get away from my yard" These hoodrats don't see that she's held back by a dogrun. Yes, we put Maya on a dog run, she's a little wild, and has run away once for 3 hours. We freaked out, there were tears while driving around the hood looking for her. I even thought that someone had kidnapped her....she was just sniffing around in the woods down the hill from our house....Needless to say, we know now that this thing cannot be trusted. I feel kinda safe living in a neighborhood where gunshots on the weekends happen somewhat regularly.

But I'm not the only one with "maya fever" SB, loves her more than I do. He's never had a dog, and she is in his words, "everything I ever wanted in a dog" (she is crushing his lap as I type this, and he is complaining about it, but he loves that ginormous lump of fur so much, that he just rubs her, and tells her that she's a "good lady") Maybe there will come a day when I don't love this thing so much....but I doubt it. She's pretty much the perfect dog... for us....