Felix @ 11

Today the Best Dog Ever* turns eleven or as Lorne Green would calculate “that’s 80 for you and me” — depending on your calculation. I always went with human years * 7 plus 3.

I math digress. Felix is older but not old.

I adopted him in April 2106 from the Humane Society in Payson, Arizona. He might have gotten renamed “CC” because it was only the landing the month before a long term contract with Creative Commons thanks to Paul Stacey. Before this, being an itinerant edtech quote/un-quote consultant, I was traveling much, one year it was 80%, not home enough to care for pets. The CC gig meant my work was steady for 18 months, giving me enough confidence to feel like I could adopt a dog.

The ad on the web site led me to look at another dog, who I might have chosen, Felix was so new he was not yet listed, but he sure was making a ruckus when I went in the back room. They asked me if I wanted to see anbother one, so they brought Felix out to meet me.

I was sitting on a low bench, and he leaned next to me hard.

I had been chosen.

The word on Felix was he was known for continually jumping the fence of his owners, who left him alone outside while they went to work, and was always running away. Neighbors would either take him home or call the Human Society. Apparently this last time, Felix had jumped the fence but got stuck on it with his collar.

The owners never came to claim him.

So he had abandonment issues, big time separation anxiety. But I had an ideal gig of mostly working from home, so he mostly would be with me. In those fist weeks, I tried a few experiments to leave him alone, which, were… really not good. The howling, crying. I recorded a few as a series of “Felix Home Alone” videos.

Thus I pretty much took Felix with me in I needed to go to town for errands, he would stay in the truck. We did long road trips, camping, a lot of time in the Red Dog F-150. He joined me for a drive from Arizona to Saskatchewan in 2017 to visit Cori when we were dating.

On a night when Cori and I went out for dinner, Felix pushed the screen out of a second story window, and the neighborhood witnessed an anxious dog on the roof, brining a visit from the fire department.

That did not endear him at all to Cori! But she did not give us the boot, as we are all one family now.

And oddly enough, since we have a house with 2 cats, Felix has grown to be comfortable here left alone, often for 8, 10 hours with no problem.

Okay, I have to backtrack. The first summer with Felix, I took him for a day trip to Flagstaff. We came across an event in a city park, all about rescue dogs. We enjoyed walking around the exhibits, and I spotted a table from the Payson Humane Society, the place I h ad adopted Felix. I expressed my appreciation, and the woman there light up. “I remember Felix!”

She was the person who took all the photos for the web site and she said she would send me his puppy photo.

Puppy Felix flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license

“Did you know that when he was brought in as a puppy, we named him ‘Strale’. That’s Italian for ‘Lightning’ for those marks on his nose.”

I thought about this and was confused because in Google Translate, “strale” did not translate to “lightning” nor the other way. So I reached out to an expert, I emailed Jim Groom’s wife Antonella, whoi explained it.

Strale in Italian meant not the lightning in the sky, but the kind that came from the finger tips of Zeus!

So there is Puppy Felix formerly know as Strale in 2014. And thus this morning, I took a photo attempting for the same pose, as close as he was able to would produce. So tonight, 80 year old in dog years, Felix, gets a toy dinosaur.

Play on!

Featured Image: Composite of Felix’s puppy photo in 2014 and him now in 2025. It is shared under a CogDog Have Fun With It License, 1.0, or in human years, CC-BY.