I thought about this for a moment. "Great!" I said, "She's doing great!"

"Great!" my sister said. "I'm doing great!" But she was lying. She wasn't doing great. In fact, she'd been feeling kind of stressed out, so she decided to unwind by taking Sophie and Stanley, her two chocolate Labs -- dogs with hearts of gold and brains the size of M&M's -- for a drive to a lake just outside Vancouver.

In the end, my sister and her dogs raced safely back into her apartment, which she is now reluctant to leave. "A friend asked me to go to a movie," she said, "but there's no way I'm going outside in the foreseeable future."