Nadi: My dog.... the light of my life

A few people that I meet tell me that i spend entirely too much time worrying about my dog. I will find myself in social situations where I feel as though I have been there "long enough" and start to worry about if she is lonely. I take her on very long walks every day - which is good for both of us. I buy her the probably unnecessary premium food, she always gets a bit of whatever I am eating at every meal, and she gets to sleep anywhere that she wants including on my bed and on the sofa even if this means I have to move around to accommodate her.

The people who say I spend too much of my time on her can suck eggs man, because even if they are correct, I am not going to change anything that I do about how I interact with and care for her. She has been a major part of my life for 7 years and with any luck and of course regular medical care she will be with me for another 7, maybe more. I can't imagine her not being in my life and just thinking about that inevitable day makes me a bit sad.

Getting Nadi was not my choice. The girl I was dating at the time acquired her as a rescue while I was at work and I just came home one day and we had a dog. At first I thought it was a bad idea because dogs have the potential to seriously complicate your life. This factor of Nadi has been a problem on multiple occasions when I was changing cities and especially when I changed countries. It has been worth all the extra time and effort though.

I got lucky though, because she also just happens to be extremely well-behaved. I did put some effort into training her but in the 7 years we have been together (she spent 1 year with another family) she has never really caused any problems. She has only gotten in the garbage once and this was because it was a short dustbin next to my desk and I put chicken wing bones in there. Some things are just too much to resist. When I got home she knew she had done something wrong and had that sad look in her eyes, but I didn't even get upset with her.

She also offers zero resistance at bathtime and actually kind of looks forward to the process (or so it seems) because she knows that the "special treats" are reserved for post bath times.

Even though I do my best to encourage exercise in her life, around the house she is basically just a lie around dog who will every now and then warn me about people that are in the hallway. This is another aspect of her that is quite rare with smaller dogs: She isn't yappy and this is just perfect because I find that to be a very annoying aspect of a lot of small breeds.

She also falls asleep in some really silly positions and I have to be very quiet in order to get these shots because she wakes up and changes it with the slightest sound.

or like this, which is a favorite on the floor

Everywhere that I take her with me, which is most places, the staff there are just as happy to see her as they are to see me. I think they actually prefer her to be honest and I can't blame them. Several of our frequent watering holes actually have bought treats to give to her when she comes along. If I DARE turn up without her the first thing they say to me is not "can i get you a beer?" but rather it is "Where is Nadi?"

At the moment, Nadi and I are relatively secure in our placement in Vietnam and it is actually because of her that we are still here. Back when Covid was making the whole world go bananas, we had a flight back to the USA to beat the deadline that was imposed about international dogs no longer being allowed into the US out of fear of rabies. It didn't matter that she has been vaccinated against rabies since she was 1.3 years old. I had a flight, but Qatar, one of the only airlines that was flying out of Vietnam and also accepts dogs as cargo, cancelled the flight on me at the last minute. I obviously was not going to abandon her or leave her with someone else so I simply decided that I was going to overstay my visa... fines and penalties be damned.

Out of sheer luck the Vietnamese government changed their stance on expats just a few weeks later and basically told us we could stay as long as we wanted to.

So this is where we are going to remain until they change that point of view.

There are a lot of great aspects about having a dog and one of them is that you are never alone. I am not terribly prone to loneliness anyway but I know that I always have my best friend with me wherever I go and really, it doesn't really matter to me what the cost is, she always will be.

I'm sure there are other dog owners out there that feel the same way. Nadi is basically my child and even if people start to think I baby her too much - I don't care what they think. This is the way I always will be towards her.