Well, I have always been a fan of dogs and the one breed I have always wanted is a German Shepherd. My wife also is a big animal person so after we had been married for about 4 years or so we decided we would get a dog. I have had them all my life but I was a little concerned about getting a big dog right away since my wife had never really had pets. We settled on a Shetland Sheepdog since, by all accounts, they are easy to train and are highly intelligent. We were not disappointed in our choice and she is and has been a great companion. A few years passed and we decided to get another dog. We both felt that we were comfortable enough now to get a bigger dog so we sought out a breeder that is close and picked our new family member. I chose him because it appeared he was going to be big and that is what I wanted, not knowing that “big” was exactly what we got.
All of our pets, (cats, dogs, ferrets, turtles), all had names that began with an “S” so we figured there was no reason to break tradition. We thought long about it and I remembered as a youngster my uncle had a Border Collie named “Sparky” and once he was gone he got another one and named him “Cinder”, I guess a play on the notion that they had a Spark, which eventually becomes a Cinder. The name “Sinder” was chosen and the spelling done as such to keep the integrity of the “S” names.
He grew into a beautiful animal, but there came a point when it seems he would not stop growing and as it stands at the time of this post he is about 5 weeks removed from turning 4 years old and weighs right around 120 lbs. and stands 28” at the shoulder.
Once he got a little older I began training him for Search and Rescue. He was doing very well but after some time I could see that he was becoming a little aggressive. This concerned me and the others involved with the group and I did what I could to calm him down but it continued to get worse. I stayed home one day from work and while I was in the other room I could hear him suddenly start going berserk in the kitchen. I walked in to find a group of young boys that meet the school bus near our house knocking on the window and pulling faces and teasing him. It was all making sense now as to why he was becoming aggressive and since that time, he has a real hard time with younger boys. I had a nice talk with the leader of the Search and Rescue group and we concluded that since a good majority of people that get lost are young children, it may not be good to have him looking for them for fear of him injuring them. So, as such, he is now just a really big couch potato. He is a great dog and he is a lot of fun.
Anyway, as I got more involved with barbecuing, Sinder became a good companion while I was running in and out of the house and he always knows when the food is about done. I decided to call my cooking equipment “The Sinder Pit” since it became apparent that as long as I was cooking, he was always under foot. The area where I live had alot of volcanic activity however many millions of years ago so there are alot of places to find Cinders, you know, those little pieces of red or black porous rocks used for landscaping and such that get stuck to the bottom of your shoe and you bring them in the house only to step on one in bare feet later and make you scream like a little girl. There are places that excavate these little pieces of excrutiating pain and we call them cinder pits. Therefore, it seemed fitting that since my dog is such a big part of my cooking AND he can be a royal pain, the name just kinda had a nice ring to it...
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