Gage is our beloved golden retriever that we got on August 8th, 2008 (08-08-08), which was exactly a year before our wedding date. Many of you have heard this story, but the reason we got him was as a gift of our engagement. That’s a whole different video, but I told Amy that we could get a dog for me losing the bet and in the process asked her to marry me. We named the dog Gage, short for En-Gage-ment.
Now the dog has his own twitter account and website. He thinks he runs the relationship. Just kidding, but we love him a lot and here’s a couple experiences we’ve had with him recently. The first video is of him meeting my sisters new chihuahua / miniture pinscher puppy named Bandit. Bandit took control of the relationship real fast.
The second video is of Gage swimming for the first time. He’s been around water a lot, but never deep enough he had to swim. Of course golden retrievers are bred to swim, but the first time can be a doozy. He acted like a pro and wanted more. It’s too bad we don’t have somewhere like this a little closer to home than southern Iowa (Roberts Creek). He’s had a couple good stories about water. One time we took him for a walk by a little lake in our area and decided there weren’t many people around we’d see what he did if he got wet. So with the leash on we let him in to the water. We, as in Amy, decided he had enough and tried to get him to come out. There was a pretty good size bank he was afraid to jump up and I couldn’t pull him up by the leash, then it pulled the colar off of him and he just thought he’d start heading towards the middle of the lake. We were able to call him before he got very far away, but it was far enough away that Amy had a canary. I put the collar back on him and tightened it up, before we pulled him out. I thought it was kinda fun, but Amy hasn’t wanted him around water since. This video just shows how much he loves it.
ps, I’m also embeding these videos with the new youtube HTML5 embed api to be a geek.