Steven Oliver - October 14, 2006 to February 15, 2018

During my first conversation with David, Steve came up. It was a few days after I had moved from the F-16 group to the JSF group at Lockheed. I was talking with some coworkers, including David, about weekend plans. I told the group that I was going to the animal shelter that weekend to adopt a cat. Other coworkers talked about their pets and David said that while he didn’t have a pet, someday he would have a dog named Steve. He thought Steve was the best dog name ever. 

Fast forward about 15 months and David and I were engaged. I already had a house, so David thought that we should get a dog named Steve as soon as possible after we got married. I was not onboard with getting a dog but I also wanted to be a good wife, so I thought I should go along with the dog thing. I remembered when I went to Alaska in middle school with my parents and we visited a dog sled camp. I loved the huskies, so I suggested to David that perhaps Steve could be a husky. That’s all it took. David started researching huskies. 

We started keeping an eye out for husky pups in the area and around Thanksgiving, a month before we got married, we found some puppies. They had been born on my dad’s birthday, so I thought it must be a sign that those pups were destined to be part of our family. 

We brought Steve and Kat home the Saturday after Thanksgiving. David was scheduled to leave on a wind tunnel trip the next day for two weeks, so I plunged 100% into figuring out how to be a dog mom. I’m sure it wasn’t perfect, but we all survived. Steve did a great job teaching me how to be a dog mom and never let me mess up too bad.

Steve (and Kat) have been with us our entire marriage and through lots of changes as we figured out our careers. Steve has lived in seven different apartments or houses and five different cities. Through it all, he was always happy to go along with the flow. 

In addition to a lot of moves, Steve went on a lot of travels and adventures. He flew in an airplane and he went camping, hiking, and snowshoeing many times.  He also went to the Olympics and a taping of The Colbert Report. He was a trooper through long days in New York City, Philadelphia, and Boston, even when the Today Show turned us away after telling us the night before that we could stand outside the studio with dogs. Steve loved to swim. In fact, he swam in both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. He also enjoyed canoeing and he even rode on a tube at the lake, through I’m not sure that was his favorite activity.

Steve was a very good dog. He never really did anything bad. He did have a habit of finding the wildlife in our Seattle yard which made for some interesting attempts at prying squirrels from his jaws. Once I had a hold of Steve’s body and David was trying to get the squirrel out of his mouth. Eventually David told me not to look. Apparently Steve wasn’t going to give up the squirrel without it getting messy! 

Steve loved to eat and definitely could tell time. You could set your watch by his demands for meals. We used to call him “Demand-o.” I’m not sure what we will do on the weekends now that we don’t have our 6 AM wake-up-I-need-to-potty bark, followed by the 6:30 AM wake-back-up-I-need-breakfast bark, followed by the 7 AM get-up-again-because-I-need-to-poop-and-didn’t-do-it-when-I-was-out-at-6 bark. 

Steve was also a great brother to Kat. He never minded that she bossed him around all the time, or at least he didn’t mind enough to do anything about it. He was also a great cousin to our niece, even though he had very little experience with kids. He loved it when she came to visit. He was a good nephew and grand dog, winning the hearts of even my family who does not like dogs in the house. No one met Steve who didn’t love him.  Steve also had many friends across the globe that we “met” through blogging and I know they are shedding tears for him, just as I have shed tears for their pups. 

Steve helped me get through law school, the bar exam, stresses at work, and just about everything. Nothing can be too bad when you have a happy face waiting for you at home.

We will miss Steve and will always love him. He was the best dog. The squirrels in heaven better watch out.