dog!

We have a puppy!  Well, he’s big - almost full-size, but he’s still young.  We adopted a Rhodesian Ridgeback from a rescue in Ohio.  I wanted to put some pictures up here so you could see what he looks like, but he doesn’t EVER stop moving.  Even in his crate.  =)  This is the best I could do:

He’s adorable, is he not?  I like the first picture because it shows his wrinkly forehead.  His face gets all “squishy” (as friend Claudia says) when he hears something or concentrates on something.  Look how skinny he is - you can see all of his ribs!  And this is after 2 months of being fostered, too.  The foster family said that when they picked him up from the pound, he was half that weight. 

The second picture cracks me up - check out that tongue.  =)

There’s a lot to get used to - even though he’s a super-short-haired dog and doesn’t really shed, there’s still hair on my clothes.  This is new - I’m a big fan of black, and it’s going to be hard keeping his hair off my black clothes.  This morning (the morning after New Year’s Eve), he wanted to go out to pee.  Early.  =) 

Oooh… and he’s smart.  He’s learned how to trick people, and we have to try to unlearn those things with him.  And he’s stubborn.  He bears down really hard and drags you when you leash him with a normal collar, so we bought this $25 collar/harness thing called “the Gentle Leader”.  That thing rocks - it slows him down quite a bit.  It works by putting pressure on his nose and the back of his neck instead of the front of his neck (like a normal collar & leash would).  Hardhead that he is, though, he still pulls against it - then he jerks back because he doesn’t like the pressure - then he pulls against it again.  =)

So, this dog doesn’t have a name yet.  The foster family called him Duke, but a) we don’t think he looks like a “Duke”, and b) I hate that name.  We want to give him a fun name - a mathemetician or theologian’s name, or something in Swahili or Hawaiian.  Riemann?  Luther?  Kekoa?  We don’t know.  Any ideas for us?