Tuesday, April 08, 2008

Making promises I can't keep, and What's in a name?

I promised myself I'd pay more attention to this space. And look, a whole March without a post.

A lot of things keep happening and changing, but there are two changes that happened a long time ago and I keep meaning to update you. First and foremost, my sister Jackie moved in with us January 23rd. She had a rough first few weeks, but then she got a job and realized how cool it is to make good money and live somewhere where it's 80 degrees in February, and she started to love it.

The day after Jackie arrived, I found a small white dog wandering around on our street. He had a nylon rope around his neck, and was filthy and matted. He came to me without much fight, so I brought him upstairs, bathed him and gave him a squirt of Advantage, intending to call Animal Control. Instead, he slept over, and then we took him to the vet, where we found out he was chipped! Yay! we called the owner and left a message... twice. No response. His skin was infected from a flea infestation - he constantly was scratching at himself. We figured we'd find a new home for him, but it's been over two months and he's made himself a part of our family.



When I first found him, I was calling him Boy Dog. I didn't want to name him because I thought if we named him, we'd get really attached to him and we'd have to give him away. Giving him away would be no easy feat to begin with - he's older, lazy, and as sweet and cuddly as he is, he is not completely housebroken. (I won't go into detail about how we got the carpets cleaned a week before we found this dog, and now... well, you can imagine.) Anyway, once we decided we were keeping him, we started to try to think of a name for him. We went through everything from Barkley to Spot, but just last week we thought of Uncle Traveling Matt (think Fraggle Rock). So now, he's Uncle Traveling Matt, or Traveling Matt, or Uncle Matt, or just Matt... but mostly, he's still Boy Dog.



At this point, there's no way we could ever give him away. Noodle would never forgive us.