Remembering the funny times!

A year ago today I woke up to find my eleven year old English Bulldog had passed away in his sleep on his side of the bed.  I might note here that he slept on a sleep number bed and his sleep number was 65, anything above or below he would whine.  Anyway, in thinking about this loss today I had my lemonade moment of do I post only about the loss of my puppy or do I share what living with an English Bulldog is really like.

I've had English Bulldogs a good portion of my life, I teethed with one in my playpen and had one or two around all through my teenage years.   I got this one and things would never be the same again. From the time Jiggs was a puppy his favorite playtime was for my sister to spank his butt with an empty water bottle and he would run all over the house and come back for more.  Such a simple game I thought if this is all he's got he's going to be a breeze.  Oh was I wrong, so so wrong!

Jiggs first summer was nearing and my sister thought it would be fun for him to have a pool to  play in to keep cool while we were at work.  So she finagled a kiddie pool into her car and came home proudly showing what a good puppy Auntie she was.  We set the little blue pool up, filled it with water and then introduced him to his new refreshment oasis.  I picked him up and set him down into the water, where he promptly began to drink the cool water.  So far so good right?  So in honor of the cute moment we were experiencing we went into the house to go get the camera to capture this Kodak moment.  Coming out the back door and clearing the patio we looked over to see the last piece of the pool being shredded in a mud puddle and Jiggs looked up with the pool piece in his mouth with a look of "what?" on his face.  I looked at my sister and we just shook our heads, cleaned up the 400 pieces of muddy pool fragments, she called him a name and that was that.

I wish I could tell you that was his only Bulldog infraction, but it was just the beginning of his illustrious career.

Another highlight was numerous escapes that resulted in his being jailed twice at the Humane Society and costing me many hundreds of dollars.  Then we would try again to foil his attempts to go be social alone (aka escape again).  At one point he got bored and began chewing up our wood fence.  I wasn't really all that concerned since it backed another wood wall of our neighbors shed I figured he would get bored or tired before I needed to worry about anything.  Yes I know, what was I thinking.  So one afternoon I got home from work and within 10-15 minutes a knock on the front door and the sound of familiar bulldog sounds on the other side.  I opened the door with our next door neighbor standing there grinning with Jiggs on a leash.  I opened the door and let him through as he promptly went to my room and crashed and found out that when the neighbor got home she walked in and heard snoring.  She went to her living room and laying on his back on her leather sofa sound asleep was Jiggs.  We had to back track his movement to discover he had eaten through our fence, the wall of her shed, partial contents of her shed and through the door.  Sauntered past her dog run of dogs and through the doggy door into her house for a nap.  How do you even begin to apologize for that?  Thank goodness she had a good sense of humor about it all.

After that we chain link fenced the yard, that will keep him!  Again, we couldn't have been more wrong.  But his next major accomplishment wasn't peeling the chain link, that came later but it was when we bought a 50 gallon sheep tank to keep filled with fresh water for the dogs to make sure they always had water.  We parked it against the fence with the spigot facing so we could attach a hose and leave it on a trickle to keep a good flow of water in the tank.  At least we thought it was a good idea.  After getting it all set up, my sister and I were sitting on the patio enjoying the fruits of our labor and discussing that this tank would weigh in the neighborhood of 415 pounds of water that even Jiggs couldn't do anything about that.  Yes again we are slow and have to be shown the error of our ways.   While we sat drinking our lemonade, I watched as Jiggs using only his head and strength pushed that sheep tank away from the fence far enough to get to the hose and chew it off before we could get across the yard to stop him.  It took both of us to move it back into place while he watched.  This dog was created by Satan, he has to have been!

Along with many other incidents that may come in later posts was the final one that we laugh about even now.  One night we heard a fuss out in the back yard.  The other dog was just a mess and his crying and fussing was over Jiggs had gone missing again.  Me and Bug got in my car going one direction, my sister got in her SUV and went another direction to begin the fugitive hunt against time and incarceration.  We hadn't been away from the driveway 5 minutes and my phone rang.  "I've got him" was the only words spoken as I dropped the phone, turned around in a driveway and headed back home.  I pulled into the drive way and see my sister nearing the driveway shaking her head.  As I stood at her door she opened it and said something about 'the little asshole' and pointed to him asleep on her passenger seat.  He had made it all the way down six houses and was sitting in the driveway waiting for his ride home.  When she got there, opened her door and called him he just looked at her.   She had to get out, pick him up, carry him to the car and put him in where he flopped over and snored before she got the car into drive.  I had to go around to the passenger side, open the door and carry his highness into the house. Poor dude was exhausted from the 2 block walk.

Not knowing it was his final two years at the time, Jiggs discovered our pool and a yellow ball (get the irony that it was the color and size of a lemon) made for some very happy times for us.  He waited all day to get to his time to play with his ball in the pool.  I took this video a couple of years ago and it reminds me of better days with the puppy known as Jiggs, Little Man of Eaton's Clan.

For those of you who knew Jiggs, please feel free to leave a comment on your favorite Jiggs moment to share with the rest!  I only touched one a few I know.

Cheers my puppy!!