Jasmine.

June tenth. I remember the date, but am a bit foggy on the year. 1989 maybe. A pile of yellow and black and chocolate lab puppies tumbled into the world onto last week's newspaper and one of them was mine. Jasmine. Or as I was fond of calling her long before she actually earned the title, Jasmine the Wonderdog.

She is shown here in one of only 35,000 photos ever taken of her, after winning a gold in obedience and a bronze in the frisbee competition at a local Canine Olympics or some such thing. She did a lot of stuff, basically anything I ever asked of her. She took to obedience training and spoiled me for life, thinking that I was some sort of dog training genius or had some kind of 'gift' of communicating with dogs. Nope. It was just her. Well, maybe it was just her. Maybe it's just that my current dog is an idiot.*

*This remark may be the one thing that finally gets my wife to leave a comment on this blog.