The Origin of Moose

Our dog found us back in 1993, after a torrential downpour left many of the streets of our town flooded. She sauntered up to the church where Chris worked at the time, dragging behind her a beach towel decorated with hot pink smiley faces. (I think my grandparents had a similar one with yellow smiley faces when I was growing up.) Anyway, she wasn't more than a handful of fluff and she was ravenously hungry. Chris made the mistake of feeding her lasagna out of the church refrigerator and so she sat outside the door all day, waiting for him to come out and take pity on her again with Italian food.

So, we took her home. She was very adorable with all the fuzzy fur and she loved to run circles in the house while we played with her. We named her Binki. How did we come up with Binki? Well, let me tell you.

Back in the day, there used to be a chocolate syrup named Bosco. It came in a glass bottle (as did most everything else) and you added it to milk for a yummy chocolate drink. You may also remember it as George Costanza's password on the television show Seinfeld. Anyway, Chris had never heard of Bosco, I guess being on the wrong side of the Mississippi River growing up, you missed out on those things, and would good naturedly tease me about it as if it were a figment of my imagination, except that he could never remember the name, Bosco. He would call it binky. So we thought that the name fit her, since she was small and black and brown and called her Binki. She proved the name fit her when she ate an entire bag of Snickers bars and didn't die. I thought chocolate killed dogs, but she wasn't even sick.

As she grew (mainly out, not up), we called her Binki, Bink, and a new name: Moose. You see, fluff gave way to fat, and Binki just didn't quite describe her anymore. Moose was so much more appropriate. Now, she's never been terribly fat, it's just that her fluffiness adds to the overall picture, and she looks more stout than she actually is. That's what she tells us, anyway.

So "Moose" when combined with "Binki" often yields "Boose", which is what she is sometimes called when she gets underfoot and we stumble around for words to tell her to get out of the way. She is also called Mooser, Moosee, Moo (by Matthew) and Fat Moose (also by Matthew and occasionally by us).

Moose is 12 years old, which is way old in dog years. She is relatively healthy and spends the majority of the day (23.75 hours) on the couch, which she still jumps up on. I'd show you a picture, but I'm having trouble publishing them. Hopefully I can publish one soon!