Got me a new bitch

Listening to: Ludwig van Beethoven, Fidelio (Angel #67361, Otto Klemperer conducting)

The last few days you've heard nary a whisper from these parts though not due to the old (oh, so old) excuse that I'm weeping into my Wheaties over dreams dashed and discarded. No, my friends, I've moved on and I'm adjusting to a new love - yes, I do recover quickly - a girl who is sharing not only my bed but my tiny apartment as well as the hearts of my children. She is young (oh, very young) and can be very annoying at times but her capacity for love and affection far outweighs her character defects; anyway, she's young enough to be teachable.

Sure, she's a mutt but that only adds to her charm and since she's very good with the wee ones - loving, gentle, playful, affectionate - I am forced to keep her. Just out of a bad relationship ("catch em' on the rebound" is never a good strategy but sometimes you take what comes your way) but had I not intervened, her fate might have been much worse and who knows where she would have ended up? Yes, tell me I'm too much of a softie, I don't care, she's here with me and I love her.

Now, as I mention that she's had all her shots and her tubes are tied, most of you are clicking away from me, for good reason. For those of you (and you two or three know who you are) who are still with me, she's a collie/german shepard mix (mostly shepard looking) and she really is a sweetie, very mellow but I need to train her.

Since she's my first dog, I'm calling on my handful of readers who own dogs to enlighten me on some of the finer points of dog training. I took her for a nice long walk this morning and all she did was sniff everything. We went a half mile and she had to stop and smell every - EVERY - spot where a dog had left it's mark. Forty-five minutes to go a half mile and she didn't do her business. No, she waited until we got back here to get that done. Right in front of me. WTF is up with that?

Help me out with that and this: the previous owner named my dog "Robin". Yuck. A friend told me that the dog is young enough to get used to another name (and told me that two syllables for the name is optimal), that I should have no problem getting her to respond to commands with a new name. So contest time: whomever comes up with the coolest name for my doggy will get a copy of my 2-disk Holiday Mixmania! set for your incredible creativity. Multiple entries are allowed, if you repeat someone else's suggestion, the person who suggested it first wins out.

I'll keep the link on my sidebar, so get to naming my dog!