{"id":1247,"date":"2003-06-30T19:15:53","date_gmt":"2003-07-01T00:15:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/gazette\/2003\/06\/30\/20030630-introtoabbye\/"},"modified":"2023-10-12T15:32:12","modified_gmt":"2023-10-12T20:32:12","slug":"20030630-introtoabbye","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/2003\/06\/30\/20030630-introtoabbye\/","title":{"rendered":"The dog who would be queen"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It occurs to me that I&#8217;ve never told you much about the third member of our little family, the one around whom all the universe revolves, or would, if she had her way about it. I&#8217;m speaking, of course, about The Dog, aka Abbye Fabulous (or Ab Fab, for short).<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve decided I need to make her a recurring character here on the Gazette. After all, a lot of bloggers use their dogs as attractions to garner more visitors. So it stands to reason that we need a dog. We need one that doesn&#8217;t slobber as much as some, or engage in endless stick-chasing like others. We need Abbye.<\/p>\n<p><em><span style=\"font-size: 1em; font-family: var(--quote--font-family); letter-spacing: var(--heading--letter-spacing-h4); color: var(--global--color-primary); background-color: var(--global--color-background);\">By the way, this is probably a good time to point out that she&#8217;s never been overly fond of that &#8220;e&#8221; dangling from the end of her name. She considers it pretentious. She can blame me for it. I got in way over my head and just panicked.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: var(--global--color-primary); font-family: var(--global--font-secondary); font-size: var(--global--font-size-base); background-color: var(--global--color-background);\">Here are five things you need to know about Abbye, if you&#8217;re truly going to embrace her as she deserves:<\/span><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>She&#8217;s more like a cat than a dog, in many ways. She doesn&#8217;t follow people around through the day, craving their attention. She gets up on her schedule, goes to bed on her schedule, and doesn&#8217;t really care what we think about that.<\/li>\n<li style=\"margin-top: 1em;\">She&#8217;s not fat, but she is really hairy. She has multiple layers of hair and fur, like a duck, I suppose. She&#8217;ll lay in full sun on the concrete in 95 degree heat without being fazed, and she&#8217;s never known the sensation of being too cold, even in the dead of winter. She also has webbed toes.<\/li>\n<li style=\"margin-top: 1em;\">She&#8217;s absolutely afraid of everything. Blowing leaves, moths, pecans falling out of trees, blades of grass that behave in unexpectedly aggressive fashion&#8230; all of these things and many more are cause for great consternation in her life.<\/li>\n<li style=\"margin-top: 1em;\">Unless, of course, she spots a squirrel. Then she&#8217;ll run through razor wire and broken glass to give chase. The hunting instinct is strong.<\/li>\n<li style=\"margin-top: 1em;\">She was a malnourished, beaten-down, broken-tailed shadow of a dog when we rescued her; she didn&#8217;t walk to people, she crawled on her belly. I&#8217;d love to introduce my Colt Python to the guy (I&#8217;m sure it was a man, although that word really wouldn&#8217;t apply, now, would it?) who put her in that state. So none of the preceding &#8220;eccentricities&#8221; are really her fault.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Abbye, in all her, um&#8230;glory. As you can see, she&#8217;s a little shameless, too.<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\"><img decoding=\"async\" style=\"max-width: 100%; height: auto; border: 1px solid #ccc;\" src=\"http:\/\/www.ericsiegmund.com\/images\/fireant\/abbye-pillow.jpg\" alt=\"Photo: Abbye reclining on her big pillow\" \/><\/p>\n<p>I know you&#8217;re just dying to learn more about Abbye, so stay tuned. I expect her to turn up occasionally here in the Gazette.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It occurs to me that I&#8217;ve never told you much about the third member of our little family, the one around whom all the universe revolves, or would, if she had her way about it. I&#8217;m speaking, of course, about The Dog, aka Abbye Fabulous (or Ab Fab, for short). I&#8217;ve decided I need to&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/2003\/06\/30\/20030630-introtoabbye\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">The dog who would be queen<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[80],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1247","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-abbye","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1247","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1247"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1247\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12757,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1247\/revisions\/12757"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1247"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1247"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1247"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}