No dog ever lived more by the mantra "I do what I want!" than Wallace. In her early years she would sleep all day in her heated dog house waiting for Larry to come home from work, because that meant another meal. And boy did she love to eat, especially in the car. No sooner would the car start moving and all of a sudden we would hear the chomping, food would fly everywhere because she did want to miss what was going on outside, there might be a stray hot air balloon or something!

And in her prime that dog could run, especially in order to chase little things that moved - she killed at least 2 squirrels that I know of, and another time she bolted from the car at a bike race, and started chasing a little minature greyhound around the field. The little dog ran around a guy that had his back turned on the whole commotion. Wallace wasn't so lucky, ran right into the guy and took him out at the knees, the guy was flat on the ground. No harm done. She was already back at the car while we picked the guy up and brushed him off and apologized profusely.

Another bike race, another opportunity for Wallace to bolt, this time it was in the pouring down rain in a hotel parking lot surrounded by a little statue garden. This time she realized only too late that that little donkey thing was not running away from her, she tried to put on her brakes but the ground was too slick and she slid head first into the statue and knocked it over. Some guy who saw the whole thing and went to pick up the statue could hardly move it it was so heavy. Wallace was ok, just a little perturbed that the darn thing didn't run, that's all.

Then there was the time she bolted from the house in Redmond after the guy who walked his cats on leashes. There she was running circles around him, with him swinging the cat in a circle 4 feet off the ground. Luckily for Wallace, the cat wriggled out of its collar and bolted for the tree behind the man's house, Wallace got to chase it all the way there. But then the chase was over and she was back at the house, while the fire department came to get the cat out of the tree and the wife was screaming about her husband almost having a heart attack. Boy those people were mad at us!

Even in her latter years, when it became harder to get up in the morning, her favorite and most active time of day was in the evening when we played with the other dogs. She could meander around the whole 5 acres and bark at the hot air balloons (that got the neighbors mad though, we had to tie a leash on her with an empty plastic jug tied to the end, it made noise and wasn't fun to drag around so she got the message real quick to stop barking) or she could root around the planting beds where that dirt with the manure was mixed in, or tear all the paper out of the bags in the garage that were stored there for recycling, when we would drive the gator down to the lower section of the property, sometimes she would actually break out into a gallop "Look, Wallace is RUNNING!" and other times she would pick up the tennis ball in her mouth. Not really to DO anything with it, maybe just to see what all the other dogs were fussing about over those balls. But then, off she went again, to do her own thing.

Tribute to Wallace