I take great pleasure introducing the newest addition to our family (aka "the fur forest"), Zooey the Pug.  On Wednesday, 5 May, I received a somewhat unexpected belated birthday present.  While I was on my way to getting a Hepatitis B booster (South Africa prep), Candice sent me the following text message: "I got the pug."  The story goes like this:

On a number of occasions over the last few years, Candice expressed her desire to "get another puggie."  For those not familiar, we have a 6 year old male pug named Benny.  I was mostly closed to this idea given the limited size of our condo and the frequency with which we had to run Roomba in order to maintain livable air quality conditions.  As I thought about it over the years, I recalled the joy and hilarity Benny brought us while we raised him as a puppy.  So I wavered, and finally accepted we would eventually get another puglet.  Then Can spontaneously got the desire to adopt an "older" dog because they tend not to get rescued from the shelter and "they deserve good homes too!"  Now hold on just a moment.  I don't want to adopt a dog, bond with it for two years, and then have it croak on me just when I've trained it to fetch my shit!  So no, no elderly dogs.  I didn't want immediate heartbreak.  Selfish, I know, but I have feelings too!  And we left it there until the following parallel stream of reality began to intersect:

Somewhat frequently, my mother-in-law Judy visits a shelter called Orphans of the Storm in Deerfield, IL.  I make jokes that she does this to torture herself with sadness, but she's really just a sweet person and an animal lover who brings them treats and enjoys providing them company.  During one of her visits several weeks ago, she came across a 10 year old pug named Mary Lou who was dropped off earlier that very day.  Of course, Judy quickly called Candice to tell her all about this geriatric pug.  In addition to being old, Mary Lou, among other ailments, had a bum back leg which caused a significant limp and slowness.  At the age of 10 she was not eligible for an insurance policy through VPI (yes, our dog has health insurance and its better than mine).

We talked about it and I agreed to take a trip up to Orphans to meet her.  She was an absolute sweetheart and my heart strings were pulled.  But being the practical person I am (try to be), I knew her disability would cause a significant incongruence in the fur forest.  I was overly concerned she wouldn't be able to keep up with the powerhouse that is "Mr. Chunks" aka "Mr. Chumps" aka "Agustus Gloop."  What happens when we go to the dog beach, to the pug parties, and how is she going up and down three flights of stairs thrice daily? As much as my heart went out to her and my gut told me to adopt her, Mary Lou wasn't the right fit.

A week or two went by and two more pugs were dropped off at Orphans; two STRAY pugs, wandering the street.  The shelter named them Franny and Frog.  Orphans made Can aware of them and she paid a second visit to the shelter and was able to meet them all.  Once again, Candice passed on adopting Mary Lou for the same reasons, but in the process she bonded with Franny, a four or five year old female fawn.

Three days later, I agreed to the adoption.  Candice called and pulled the trigger; Franny was now ours.  We almost immediately agreed on Zooey as her name (playing off of the J.D. Salinger novella "Franny & Zooey").  Judy agreed to pick her up and bring her down to the city that night.  And that night was all it took for her to settle in.

The next day and since then, she's been over-the-top happy and also over-the-top attached to me, following me around the house wherever I go and plopping down next to me and the PC.  Benny hasn't exactly welcomed her with open paws and tongue, but he's getting over the "when is this pug going home" phase.  And as I step back and observe the breadth of the whole scenario, I can't help but notice:

This is now two consecutive blog posts essentially describing the way my wife exploits my compassion to realize her fringe desires.

Like celebrity deaths, do these things come in threes?

I don’t watch much TV, but I’ve seen a few episodes of the Dog Whisperer.  The following is whisperesque…

While recently walking our Pug named Benny (as is my responsibility when at home) I noticed an unintentional but direct correlation between my behavior and his. If you know anything about the Pug breed, you know they are poor walkers, stubborn, selfish, and lazy. They most often break down any pace or continuity to your walk with spontaneous and repeated spaz-outs.  And fundamentally, I am not even a dog person which can certainly cause further tension.  However, over the past week, I noticed Benny was far more in sync with me and behaving far better on our walks than usual when, and only when, I was completely and calmly mentally focused (sometimes daydreaming) on something entirely separate than our walk and the immediate circumstances around it.

Admittedly, I will occasionally hurry him around the block in severe weather or when running late.  In those scenarios, my mind is in an aggressive mode, focused on the variables that will expedite the completion of our walk.  It doesn’t work.

So as I went forth into this last walk this evening, I began to inadvertently test my hypothesis by mentally drifting off into the topics I planned to address in this blog post. Before I knew it, Benny and I were 1/2 through our walk and I realized he and I were in complete dog-walk harmony. Though I stopped with him a few times while he paused to take in (sniff) the surroundings, I barely even noticed.  We were in balance because my mind was elsewhere.

Is it karma, biorhythms, or just behavioral science?  Don’t know for sure, but I can tell you it’s certainly not sheer coincidence.

This morning’s frigid (10 F.) walk of Benny was a landmark event.  It was the first time he spun around the block wearing his brand spanking new red rubber boots.  And man was he spinning.  Putting the boots on him was only a moderate challenge…these are essentially thick rubber balloons shaped with the contour of a dog paw.  Getting him out of the condo was a more significant challenge.  As soon as the fourth boot was applied, Benny went apeshit turbo.  To his credit, he knew the fastest, most effective way to get the things off of his feet was furiously digging, front paws and back, into his bed and blanket.  He successfully removed one back-paw boot before we wrestled him to the ground to put it back on.  He was NOT pleased.

Once we got outside, he was mostly ok, but his pace in walking around the block was relentless.  He was basically in freak-out mode for a full 10 minutes, intermittently performing the four-paw-drive digging maneuver in patches of snow covered leaves.  Luckily the boots remained in place for the duration of the walk, and the first round of torture came to a close as we returned to the warmth inside.

I would have loved to snap a photo of him in his full outdoor winter wardrobe (blue jacket, orange harness, red boots), but after the last episode of dressing him up, taking pictures, and laughing hysterically, the dog was so traumatized that he literally shed tears.  So I won’t do that again…at least for a while.  Suffice it to say Benny looks absolutely ridiculous when all bundled up, and his behavior is correspondingly (is that a word?) ridiculous.  Click to see the PAWZ product home page and two model dogs…Benny’s disposition wasn’t quite so cheerful.