Here's my buddy, Bear. Photobucket is all I have access to here, so these are ancient. He'll be 3 this summer- these are from when we adopted him. HIs tongue's pretty much 3/4 purple now, he's about half chow. The other half, who knows. Border collie or something maybe, he's pretty intent on herding my kids and is a high energy spastic basketcase most of the time.
Bear was a parking lot dog- my son's grandfather called to ask if Cole wanted a dog for his first birthday, and since I understood that that meant "Hey Jake, you want a puppy?" I said "Bring him on." We adopted him, started giving him shots, kept him mostly outside but brought him in a lot. He was probably 8 or so weeks when we got him.
In the time that we've had him:
He's had parvo and lived (probably at 3 or 4 months)- I stayed up with him for nearly a week feeding him broth and giving him shots to keep it in him- I couldn't bear to just put him down, even if the vet was ready I wasn't. He toughed it out. After a week or so he was back to his old self.
He's been hit by a school bus, this was 18 months or so ago. His fence in the backyard got taken out by a falling pine tree during a storm. Before I could catch him and tie him up that morning while I figured out other options, he streaked out to the road, either bounced off the side or rolled under the axle of a school bus doing ~40mph and streaked right back. I didn't think much of it since he ran home under his own power and laid up on the porch- a cursory once-over didn't reveal any injury. When I got home that night, though, he wasn't really able to get up very well under his own power. Wouldn't let me or anybody else near him, but there wasn't anything apparently wrong, etc. I spent a couple hard days keeping an eye on him, trying to figure out what to do when he started getting up and moving around on his own. Vet checked him out a couple days later, said "nothing's broken, he must have just been roughed up."
He's one tough dog. Fantastic watchdog, probably to a fault, but he loves us and we love him and we would all be lost without his silly antics around the house. He has stayed outside a lot, since we figured out how allergic my wife is to fleas, but she's softening her stance on that since Frontline works (though the dog hates having it applied) and he's calmed down a lot in the last few months. Once spring hits, I think I am going to get him groomed (winter coat has him looking slightly rastafarian at the moment) and move him to mostly inside.