Welcome!

Welcome to the new blog about our new dog: an 18-month-old pug named Crucial Lloyd Ruffins, or "Ruff" for short. Tami and I -- Ruff's parents -- created this blog to document Ruff's new life here on the South Side of Chicago.

After our beloved Colleeny passed on, we were looking around for a new pooch. Tami in particular needed an outlet for her abundance of metaphysical "dog love", and our other dog, Mo (a 5-year-old border terrier), seemed a bit lonely and lacking in direction without his mom Colleen around to keep him in line with the occasional light-hearted mock-butt-raping.

We heard about this place near Topeka, Kansas that rescues pugs -- the pictures of the goofy little snorkers were too cute to ignore. So we road-tripped with Mo on Labor Day, and motored down to Auburn, KS -- a ten-hour-drive or so.

The folks at Prairie Pugs were super-nice, and had us over for dinner. We got to play with dozens of pugs, which was really wacky and fun. Mo was not as enthusiastic about it as we were, but we needed him there to make sure he got along okay with his new prospective housemate.

After thinking it over for the night at the Topeka Ramada Inn, we came back the next morning to pick out a pugger. There was one particularly sweet lad who really seemed to like us: with all the other pugs jumping and running around chaotically in the background, Ruff came over to each of us at different times, laying his fuzzy head on our laps and falling asleep with a little dog-snore sound. We knew we had to take him home to Chicago to be a part of our family... [to be continued]