Saturday, September 27, 2008

Blog Number 325

Greetings and welcome to today's random thought.

Well another month has almost slipped by without a blog entry. I do not know why all of a sudden I am not in the blogging mood after having been so into it for the better part of 2 years. Maybe I am finally outgrowing the need to express my frustrations to an (albeit small) audience. I haven't really thought about it much actually until today (just now actually). The big news in our household is the arrival of our new dog...

nina_09-27-08

Her name is Nina (long I on the first syllable like the number 9) and she is a Doberman. We purchased her from local a local breeder. In fact, they were the same folks that turned us on to Gabbi (our dog that was lost in the auto accident in April). We got our deposit in early and were able to snag our pick of the litter. You might be wondering about the name Nina, but before I go into that let me tell you some of the names that we were thinking of...

Latte: This was a close 2nd. Part of the reason was because of her coat's color and part of the reason was that (at $375) we were going to have to give up latte's for a while in order to pay for her.

Caspian: This would have been our pick if we ended up with a male puppy. It seems like a very noble name for such a noble breed. Having just now seen the Prince Caspian movie helped a little too.

Shelby / Sugar / Ginger / Princess: These were all the names our 6 yr old daughter added to the mix. We ruled out Sugar and Princess our of mere principal. Ginger was actually a name of the mother of one of the kids in her swim class. I guessed she really liked the name as there is no better honor (from a 6 year old anyway) than having them name their pet after you.

(Insert arbitrary German, female name here [Heidi, Helga, etc]): The wife was convinced that since the Doberman is a German breed that it had to have a German name. She fought very hard but in the end she was outvoted.

Meecham: OK, a little explanation here. A long, long time ago (like 20 years ago) I worked at a local bowling alley. They had the first automatic scoring system in town and so you had these monitors that hung 10 foot in the air to show your score. You had to punch your name into the lane system before you could bowl and when it was your turn it would display your name at the bottom of the screen (along with flashing some arrows in the row for your score). Anyway, one night I was bowling a few lanes away from some teenage girls that were also bowling and from my angle I swore that one of the girls was named Meecham. I thought that was such a cool / unique name. I wandered over to behind their lane to see how good they were bowling and then noticed that the name was actually Meagan and the extreme angle I was at had tricked me. Ever since then though I have remembered that name and swore I would name something Meecham. The wife did not like this name for a dog any more than she liked it for our daughter's name when she was born.

This brings us to Nina: We have not had good luck with dogs since we have been married. In our defense, we lost one dog in a car crash and had to get rid of two dogs due to moving. The other 5 were just bad dogs that we got mostly from the local dog pound. This dog (if we counted correctly) is our 9th dog. She is also the 9th born out of a litter of 10. So I decided that Nina (9-a) would be a great choice. I am also convinced (though I have no proof) that dogs respond to short names (1 or 2 syllables) that have a long vowel in the 1st syllable.

Anyway, Nina is doing great. She is very smart and has already (at barely 10 weeks) mastered the sit, lay, shake, high five and speak tricks. She is almost sleeping through the night and stays in her cage without whining too much. The 1st week was rough but she is shaping up to be a great dog. We don't want to have to go out and get our next dog (temporarily named Rin 10 10) anytime soon.

Thanks for reading my Random Thoughts.

Jon

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