Things I’m not allowed to do without a small furry escort

The night routine is like this:

Chance falls asleep between 9 and 11 depending on how much time he got alone and whether he found something nice to chew himself to sleep on.

We go to bed sometime between 11 and 1ish. (It’s a weekend and vacation.)

He’s tired when we go upstairs (I carry him) and immediately jumps into his bed….
…until I start to change. Then he has to follow me to the hamper, then back to bed…
…until I go to the bathroom. The he has to follow me in there, tilts his head a lot at all the running water, gets bored when I brush my teeth, and goes back to bed…
…until I need to grab something from the closet. Then he has to follow me in there to see the dog in the wall mirror. Then it’s back to bed…
…until I get in bed and shut out the light. Then he has to explore the room for a minute until I yell at him to go back to bed. He chews on the blanket and the stuffy….
…until he falls asleep. Then it’s quiet and peaceful and everyone’s happy.

That is, until he has to pee, at 5am.

Chance is home.

He’s somehow tinier than I expected – might be because his mom Josie is actually smaller than JessieDog was. So very perfect though. He got carsick on the ride from Virginia to Delaware and I think that’s probably why he has mostly slept since coming home. Only really whined twice and both times Nighthawk and I had simultaneously disappeared from view.

I’m already very happy. So is Nighthawk. We think Chance is too. This should be the beginning of a long and beautiful friendship.

***
just to prove that it can’t come up roses all the time, our camera broke this evening. Puppy pics will be coming but not tonight.

Bittersweet as always

To make it official: that cute little boy that’s been appearing in random places on the site is coming home tomorrow. His name is unofficially Chance Benedict Gibson, though I’m sure he’s got some really cool name like Dog Branch Farm’s Chance or something to indicate the awesome breeder he comes from, so that’s how I labeled him in today’s comic.

He’s got a sister of sorts (no blood relation) named Kaylee who comes home in the middle of August. At least, according to plan.

Folks who hear we’re adopting two terrier puppies generally consider us insane. And we are, but not because of the terriers. In fact, the “shorties” we’re adopting are calmer and more companion-like than your standard Parson Russell Terrier. We’re almost 100% sure that lazybutt the wonder dog was a shortie, now that we’ve seen more of them, and not the potential terrier/beagle/dachshund/corgi mix that we were wildly speculating. She sure has the described temperament, and she’s got a lot in common with Chance’s mama.

The fact is, Jess was lonely when we weren’t here. We can’t work from home every day. A dog shouldn’t have to be alone all day any more than a kid should. So by adopting two terrors, we’ll at least be ensuring they have someone to play with when we’re not home.

And hey, we live in a condo, so it’s not like they’ll be wrecking a great piece of architecture.

I miss Jessie. I miss her more tonight than I probably have in a month or two. Stuff that was hers today will be someone else’s tomorrow. Boundaries are being broken. I’d give up the opportunity two adopt a hundred puppies just to have her back with us for a few more years.

It’s supposed to be hard and it’s supposed to hurt because if it was easy and it didn’t hurt I’d have to question just how much I loved her. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t suck.

But she’s still here, in our hearts and our photos and, well, right now her collar’s holding my drink…. And in the meantime, we’ve got enough room in those hearts and photo albums and the rest of our lives to accommodate two more furry children, so it’s time.

And tomorrow, we get a puppy!! :)

Neither of us has ever owned a male dog before, so this is bound to be interesting. We’ve got tons and tons of toys for him, and a whole variety of treats and stuff. It’s funny — the day we adopted Jess we woke up that morning, said “Hey, want to adopt a dog?”, drove to the SPCA, and had JessieDog home before dinnertime. This time we’ve literally spent months planning, and the entire last two weeks were dedicated to cleaning and reorganizing and shopping (oh the shopping) so that our little boy will have more going for him than the “Hey Dad, can I borrow a baby gate?” approach we took with Jess. Nighthawk has observed on multiple occasions that this feels like having a baby – albeit a much less expensive, already clothed, forever-two baby that doesn’t need a college fund.

And the double-bonus is that since we know we’re getting two pups we can buy ahead a little, so things should be even easier when Kaylee flies home in August.

Or so I say now…. we’ll see what I have to say as the next week or so passes.

Reading List

“Big Read”‘s 100-Book List
kirabug — stolen from peri-renna’s site.

If you choose, look through the following list of books and:
1) Bold those you have read.
2) Italicise those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) * Put a star next to the ones you’ve only partially read.
5) Strikethrough the ones you refuse to read.
6) Reprint this list in your own LJ (or in my case, the blog).

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen

2 * The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien

3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte

4 * Harry Potter series – JK Rowling

5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee

6 The Bible

7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte

8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell

9 * His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman

10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens

11 * Little Women – Louisa M Alcott

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy

13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller

14 * Complete Works of Shakespeare

15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier

16 * The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks

18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger

19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch – George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell

22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald

23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens

24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams

26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh

27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck

29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll

30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy

32 * David Copperfield – Charles Dickens

33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis

34 Emma – Jane Austen

35 Persuasion – Jane Austen

36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis

37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres

39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden

40 * Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne

41 Animal Farm – George Orwell

42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown (I own it, does that count for anything?)

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving

45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery

47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood

49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding

50 Atonement – Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel

52 Dune – Frank Herbert (own that too)

53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen

55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens

58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck

62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov

63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold

65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas

66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac

67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding

69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie

70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens

72 Dracula – Bram Stoker

73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett

74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses – James Joyce

76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath

77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal – Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray

80 Possession – AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens

82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell

83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker

84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro

85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert

86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White

88 * The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Alborn

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad

92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery

93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks

94 Watership Down – Richard Adams

95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole

96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas

98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl

100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

Not a bad showing, if I do say so myself.