I mentioned in my first post that my love for salchichas began with the first one my parents bought back before I was 10. I don't remember why they decided on a miniature long-haired dachshund, but boy am I glad they did! Here is a picture of Rudy and me, I think pretty recently after we had adopted him:


Rudy got his name after Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer because he had a red nose too! I don't remember much of him as a puppy but he was such a sweet dog!

After a year or so, we (or better yet, my parents) decided to get a female so that we could plan on having dachshund babies!! We named our second dachshund Snickles. She was a little spitfire, I mean, boy was she ornery when she wanted to be. She had way more spunk than Rudy, who was just a big push-over. Here is a picture of the two of them as adults:


Most of the pictures I have of these pups are not digital, so these are pictures that I scanned at some point in my life. My parents probably have a ton of printed pictures at their house, but they are currently en route to Chile so this is all I've got for you.

In the end, we never bred the two. First of all, we think Rudy turned out gay. I wish I could get into the details of how we came to conclude that, but I'd rather not go off on a tangent. It definitely wasn't a problem...it was just one of the reasons we didn't get to have dachshund babies at home. The second reason was that Snickles had an episode of paralysis in which we found out she had a fused vertebrae and . She ended up coming out of it, but we decided it was best not to breed them as her "bad" gene of the fused vertebrae could be passed along and who knows what a pregnant belly would have done to her back.

At one point, my parents ended up giving both Rudy and Snickles to some friends...I think they, along with two daughters, were too much to handle. They dogs were left in very good hands, but it was pretty sad for us to go from having these two bundles of energy in the house to nothing. I think that was my Junior or Senior year of high school.

That was supposed to be the end of the house dogs....but you know how those things go. I went off the college and my sister begged my parents for a dog. So during my Sophomore year in college, my family got Dunkun--a supposed long-haired miniature (turns out he's a tweenie, weighing in at about 12 or 13 lbs). I only got to see Dunkun when I went home to visit (maybe twice a semester) since I lived about a 4 hour drive from home. Here is a picture of Dunkun and me in August of 2005:


He used to get so excited to see me that he would pee every time I came home to visit. I know, I know...that may be too much information. I think I was the only person he did this with. It used to be really annoying when it happened, but looking back, he was just so happy he couldn't contain himself! Once, when I was studying abroad in 2006, I was skyping with my Dad with the webcam and all. I asked him how Dunkun was doing and if I could see him. So my Dad went to get Dunkun and held him up in front of the webcam. I started talking to him and he got so excited that he peed on the keyboard of the computer! My Dad's reaction: "Whhhhhaaaaaatttttt!!!!!!" That is my Dad's key phrase and what a funny moment that was.

Dunkun is four years old now and is a beauty. He has his little banderita (flag) tail and pretty blonde hair on his ears:


He is very much the baby of the house now-a-days. Here is a snapshot of a typical evening for Dunkun--sleeping with Dad in the recliner. He even has his own remote so he can be just like Dad!


Now my parents are on their way to visit us for Christmas and New Years and meet their grandpuppy!