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Booger lives

My family is really, really bad at naming animals.
Really, really bad.
But it didn't always start out that way.
Our first two family dogs -- a female and male collie -- were named Cindy and Button. Plain, but simple; nothing too embarrassing.
But then the namings just started to go downhill.

There was the cat that only had three legs, the result of getting his hind leg caught in one of the belts in a car. We named him Scruffy.
I know.
I had a cat named Favorite because it was, duh, my favorite.
As we've grown up over the years, age hasn't made us any wiser about names, either. In fact, it's only gotten worse.
There was this one dog we had named Osmosis because my teenager sister wanted to name him Ozzy and my mom wanted to name him Moses, hence an odd combo.
And then there was the cat, Turkey Lurkey Phil Collins.
My dad had caught it in our barn out at the farm in Cottle County and brought it to our house in Clay County on, you guessed it, Thanksgiving.
But one of my little sisters was going through a Phil Collins phase, so the name Turkey Lurkey Phil Collins was born.
Did I mention she was a GIRL cat?
There are currently three cats and a dog on the farm. There's Blackey (cuz it has black stripes), Pinky (cuz it looks pink from a distance), and Brave Kitty because he was the first to come up and eat out of my hand.
The dog is simply BD, which stands for Big Dog or Bad Dog, whichever you like.
At the Clay County house, we have an inside dog named Shepherd, who goes by every nickname imaginable -- Sheppy, Sheppo. Pepo, Peppenstein, Pepperoni, Peps, Peppy, and Potto.
The outside dogs are named Calisto and Hercules. Or, as we call them, Hurk and Lissy.
Then there's the cat named Rasputin cuz he's pure evil. It was a wild kitten my sister down at College Station literally brought in from the woods to her apartment and then decided the kitten was too wild for college (too wild for a college apartment?) She brought it to my parents' house and it has wreaked havoc on all of us. Nicknames run the gamut -- Poots, Pooty, Putin, Pootenstein.
And all of this brings me to the point of this whole story.
We've got a new dog, a beagle mix my dad recently picked up at the pound to keep BD company out in Paducah. If you're keeping track, this is our 9th family animal.
The whole family had made logical suggestions for names, settling either on Lucky or Buddy.
Good, wholesome dog names.
Papa wanted to name him Booger, but we all nixed it. We couldn't have a dog named Booger, we all told him.
But two weeks ago, the young pup ventured out into the pasture at the farm in Paducah around 3 p.m. and wasn't home by dark. Or midnight. Or the next morning.
We all assumed he was dead, fetched up by the coyotes that roam the night, which has happened to a lot of our animals over the years.
About 4 p.m. later that day, he finally wandered up to the house. Papa joked that the pup didn't say where he'd been hiding all night.
We were just all glad that he made it home.
"That pup's one tough Booger," my dad replied.
Sigh.
Welcome to the family, Booger.

Posted by Lara Richards at 10:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)