Adopting Dinkles

Some time in 2021, a little monster named Rhubarb came up for adoption.

There weren’t any vet records prior to her rescue, so “Rhubarb” was actually just a placeholder name given to her. Still, we thought the name was pretty cute, so Alley and I initially considered keeping the name. This would be our third forever dog together, after Hallie and Molly, her older sisters who are now buried in the back yard.

After Molly’s passing, I was a lot more hesitant to adopt, so we fostered for a bit instead. Pretty soon thereafter, though, Alley saw something in Rhubarb after reading her story, so we went to meet her. When we visited the pet supply store where the foster dogs were being kept, we met several senior Dachshunds. Most of them were initially curious about me, but once they realized I didn’t have any food, they kept moving.

Rhubarb was no exception. In fact, she might have been even less interested in me than the other dogs were.

There was something about her, though: the way she walked was unique.

Because of our experience in fostering and rescuing senior dogs, we understood that she had sustained some kind of injury, where her spine now limited her movement. The end result meant that this dog had to swing her legs from side to side in order to walk, for her legs remained a little too straight to just run normally.

Here’s that confident little gait:

This absolutely endeared Alley and me to this little critter. We were on our way back home from our first trip after the pandemic flipped our sense of time upside down and inside out, so Alley would need to return a week or later to officially snag this little princess—the rescue org was going to adopt her out to someone else!

We very nearly kept the name Rhubarb (it was really cute!), but being the proper nerds we are, another name came to mind.

It was on the basis of how she walked, and it hearkened back to the 1980s. It was the Dink-Dink song from Spaceballs, where the Dink-Dinks (Mel Brooks’s Ewok parody) do a little song while they are walking along the desert in a particular manner.

Rubarb became Dink-Dink, and the name has stuck.

Dink-Dink has a nice ring to it, but also lends itself to cutesy permutations. One of these nicknames I’ve settled on is Dinkles, and so I like to post pictures of her with the non-working hashtag #dailydinkles nearly every day from my Notes.

You never know what you might see out there.