We have a very good friend in California, so good in fact we adopted his parents! They’re the best! Naturally they became Kylie’s doting grandparents, and Kylie loved her grandparents!

Our best road trips were to visit them in Anaheim, and as soon as we arrived she became a different dog. She was so sweet and docile and well behaved… it was weird. We would go gallivanting with our friends and Kylie would stay at the house with her grandparents. She would sit between them on a lay-z-boy and let them spoil her rotten. She would follow them around, go on walks around the neighborhood, being friendly to neighborhood dogs. It didn’t hurt that she got a steady supply of roast beef from her grandma!

After a couple days of that we would ask her, “who are you and what have you done with our punk ass dog?” So we would try and out her. We would get one of the toys she loved to terrorize, we always brought one or two along, and try and get her riled up. It actually only worked once. She suddenly got vicious and pounced on the toy and growled aggressively. Then she suddenly stopped and looked around, and her grandma was shocked, and just as we were about to say, “you see, she’s a mean dog,” her grandma said, “Oh Kylie, are they picking on you? You poor thing.” And Kylie didn’t miss a beat, she played along and went to her like she had been beaten so that she could be comforted with a whole slice of roast beef.

Con Artist!!

The funny thing was that this behavior would go on the whole time we were there, then as soon as the first back pack was in the hatch back, Kylie was in the car and you couldn’t convince her to get out again.

As much as she loved being there, being treated like a princess, she never totally lost that fear of abandonment that shelter dogs always have. She knew if we were loading the car it meant we were leaving and she was not going to be left behind.

Silly girl, like we would ever leave her!

Once the Kylie nicknames started they kind of never stopped. Shortly after the Frankenweenie, Trashhound, Ready Kilowatt days she got her showgirl name, Kylie Espadrille Cha Cha Cha!

No, we don’t know where that came from it just sort of rolled off the tongue one day and Kylie really liked it so it stuck. We don’t know where most of her nicknames came from, but some of them were obvious like K-dog or K-diddy, which sometimes was DJ K-diddy. Some were random like Monkey or Chicken, which would become compound like Monkey Doodle or Monkey Butt, or Chicken Little or Chicken Butt. “Shorty” was also a favorite, and kind of obvious, and it also sometimes became compound like Shorty Pie or Short Pants. Then “Pants” became a very popular stand alone nickname which eventually at some point became Chicken Pants! We didn’t really know why we had started calling her Chicken Pants until the two girls were on a trip back home to hawaii, the only place we really ever went without her (quarantine laws). We were at the shooting range of all places, which was overrun with wild chickens of all things, but not just your everyday barnyard chickens, they were fancy chickens with feathers all the way down their legs so it looked like they were wearing pants…ergo, Chicken Pants!! We were so excited, it all made sense now because Kylie’s back legs were so puffy and extra furry! You can kind of tell in this picture of her hiny, even though she’s wearing her snow suit and her legs are mostly covered you can see right under her tail how thick her hair is on her hindquarters. Chicken Pants was perfect!

Her gangsta name was “Kylie Three Toes”, she got that after she lost one toe on her back left foot to cancer. But eventually we just started referring to that foot as her “Lucky Fin.”

Then there was the two week period several years ago when we realized she wouldn’t answer to Kylie anymore. So we asked her if she had changed her name. But she wouldn’t answer, so we started trying new names.. Fluffy, Fido, Sadie, we kept guessing but nothing worked so we moved on to more people names of both genders until she finally responded to one. Howard – she came when we called her Howard and not when we called her anything else.

You probably think we’re making this up, but I swear that she would totally ignore us when we called her Kylie but would snap to it when you called her Howard. Until one day she was over it and went back to being Kylie.

Kylie always had a huge imagination, so maybe she was pretending to be Howard Hughes or Howard Stern, we have no idea. But she really did like nicknames, especially when we worked them into a song or something.

God we miss Kylie Espadrille Cha Cha Cha Shorty Chicken Pants!
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We remembered another – LL Cool K!

If we remember even more, we’ll add them here as well..