I tend to get bored easily.  And looking at the same website month after month gets me a bit itchy, so I decided take a stab at a new look.  I know that the hound picture was maybe a bit iconic and it has served me well and may some day be back, but I wanted to make the site a bit more modern and more personal.   So my new header contains a picture of the original hound in my life Dickie.  Dickie was my first born.  He was found by a friend wandering by himself in the Georgia countryside and was about as big as my hand.  Instead of going to the pound, he ended up at our house.  Dickie was incredibly smart, suffered greatly from separation anxiety and was considered “The Peace Beagle” as we called that him because he hated any kind of conflict or shouting and would insert himself between us when we had an argument.  We even had Dickie and Daddy time which usually consisted of just the two of us on Saturday morning going to the Mrs. Winners restaurant and getting chicken biscuits.  He loved going with me on that ride.  The other thing he loved more than anything else was swimming.  When we lived in Midtown Atlanta, the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library was the unofficial dog park as it had a wonderful field with a pond.  He could swim for hours.  As he was the original Scented Hound,  it was also at the Carter Center where he managed to roll around on numerous dead animals as well as human poop from the neighborhood homeless men.  That was big fun.

The other dog in the picture is Laika who was Dickie’s younger sister (not by birth).  She was two years younger and looked just like him when we brought her home as a pup.  We thought “how wonderful, two of the same sweet dogs”.  I sympathize with parents who have varying personalities in children because Laika was a stinker from the time we brought her home.  She turned out to be 1/3 the size of Dickie, but ruled the house from minute one.  She would get into trouble, run away from home, nip at Dickie if he was having fun; in other words she was pretty much a pain in the ass.  But she could be sweet when she wanted to be and she too was my baby.

In any case, I have a soft spot in my heart for hounds and when I decided to create this blog “The Scented Hound” was an easy fit.  Both Dickie and Laika are long gone, but their memories live on in my heart and now they do also on my site.

Steve