Best dog picture ever, for now:

All he wanted to do was to bring happiness and teething relief to a little puppy someplace. Endorsed by the American Kennel Club, this little bear toy came into our home courtesy of my sister Christina. While I thanked her for the gift, I predicted a short stay in the house.

The following pictures were taken over the course of ten minutes; swear to god. And Hooper was kinda mellow tonight.

If you ever get a squeaky thingy stuck in your anus, Hooper is the guy to get it out in record time:







And there you have it, the deconstruction of Teddy. What a great night.

Hooper has been hanging around the joint for a month now. He’s changed our lives.

First off, Brenda now gets up at 6:30 a.m. regardless of whether she wants to or not. She’s the designated dog driver in the morning, and she’s seen some amazing sunrises and met freakish yoga people. Me, I have the night shift, and walk Hooper immediately after arriving home from work. We’ve met cyclists and weirdo dalmatian owners.

We’ve met a lot of dogs and dog owners in fact, and I know more of the neighborhood dogs by name than the owners; Morgan, Shylo, Hannah, Buster, they are all familiar faces. So are those of their owners, but I’ll be damned if they are anything other than The Lady who Owns Morgan and Hates Hooper for his Goddamned Energy, The Dude Who Owns Shylo, The Grad Student Who Owns Gorgeous Hannah, and The Self-Appointed Dog Training Genius Who Owns Bratty Buster.

Speaking of the use of the word “owner” in the context of dogs and their, uh, owners, it seems that hippie town Boulder prefers the term “guardian” for people who own their dogs. Whatever. Look, hippie, I love Hooper more than you ever will love your Grateful Dead mix tape, and besides, I have a receipt for Hoop. A receipt. So, shut the fuck up.

Hooper knows stuff. He looks to us for permission to eat and to walk through a door. He also just took a piss in the guest bedroom, so he knows how to do that too. This is unfortunate.

Hoop has gained some weight, but I think he will top out at fifty or so pounds, which is perfect. I think he will end up looking like a perpetual Lab puppy, which is perfect.

Did you know that they give out treats at the Good Times in Boulder? Well, they do. Hooper & I found this out today, mostly to Hooper’s delight. Most people driving around town also seem to melt in the presence of Hooper’s little face gazing out the rear quarter window of our Golf.

Hooper’s looking fairly dead on the floor right now, and Brenda’s looking equally expired on the couch eighteen inches from me as I type this. Currently, life is good.

Boulder Municipal Airport (KBDU) had an open house today. Not an airshow per se, but there were a couple of cool airplanes parked on the ramp (including a very rare two-seat Supermarine Spitfire trainer) for inspection. I took Hooper to the airport for our very first “father-son” type outing. It was great. At one point, a flight of three AT-6 “Texan” aircraft flew overhead, and my friend Michael got a shot of Hooper and I enjoying the show.

A few moments later, they all landed and taxied up to where we were, and Hoop didn’t even flinch. So, he likes airplanes, even the big, loud, radial-engined ones. I was so proud.

Hooper has been in our house, and our lives, for one week now. I have a week’s worth of memories, that include racing to a peeing dog; picking up poop—both outside and inside; checking under Hoop’s belly for evidence of a pee stream in the black of night; begging him to walk as he stares at me on the sidewalk; begging him to stop nipping me in the midst of one of his freak-out sessions; petting and stroking his beautiful coat; sniffing: me him, and he me as well as various piles of poo and god knows what else outside; stressing about his play skills with the two month-old puppy around the corner; stressing about his hips; stressing about how much room he has to play in our living room; joy over being a part of teaching him his first command, “sit”; the ADD feeling of trying to read seven (yes, seven) dog training/care books at once; the despair of listening to him whine; the pride in his farts.

I know Primo was a failure, but I still have a few names I wish I could call him: Coppa, Stugots, and—my personal fave—Guidry (look them all up; great names inspire research). But I guess he’s Hooper now and forever, since he actually looks at me when I call him that half the time.

Today, Hoop decided that he’s afraid of bicyclists. When he sees or hears one approaching, he stops dead in his tracks, and watches the apparently demonic mechanical cyborgs roll past. Once they pass, he’s up on his feet and ready to walk again. I know it’s a passing phase, but today’s discovery was akin to Mr. Holland the music teacher discovering his son Cole was deaf.

There are about a thousand other little gestures, smells, discoveries, fears and observations, that have been absorbed this week. I can’t believe this is happening. I love this, and I love Guidry—I mean, Hooper. (oh, he just stretched and as he did so, his paws patted my feet. How cute.)

We’re gonna go pee now.

Announcement:
Friends and family members, who may be thinking of buying a DVD copy or one-sheet for the 1978 film “Hooper”, thinking it would be a great gag gift for us, don’t do it. Because I already did.

Kinda makes me want to get him a cape and name him Underdog.

ANNOUNCEMENT:

After half a day as Primo, Hooper is once again Hooper, the name he was granted at the shelter. It just fits, we’ve decided. And, we can call him HooperSuperDuperPooper this way, which is like, excellent.

Besides, unlike most people, when I first heard his name I did not first think of lovable Mister Hooper from Sesame Street, I of course thought of the beer-swilling, bar-fighting rocket car-jumping stuntman Sonny Hooper, played by Burt Reynolds in the 1978 film by the same name. You probably didn’t see it. That’s OK, but I still recall the credits rolling to a song with the lyric “there ain’t nothing like the life of a Hollywood stuntman”. And Hooper the Dog definitely resembles a stuntman when he goes barreling down the stairs; a successful outcome usually seems unlikely.

So, yeah. Hooper. Hooper Primo King-Guglielmetti. Now all we have to do is train him to wear a cowboy hat, blow bubbles with gum, and drive a rocket car.

We brought him home today. He was manic for an hour and I thought we’d made a huge mistake, but he calmed down and he’s sleeping in his crate in the bedroom right now. I’m downstairs typing this because I don’t want to wake anyone.

He’s adorable. He’s afraid of his own reflection in the oven door; he walked into the sliding glass door and the glass around the gas fireplace, but to his credit he only did both of those moves once each. When I go upstairs to pee, he runs downstairs to the front door. He responds to “anh-anh” when he eyes the couch, he’s starting to associate treats with good deeds, and I have no idea what the fuck I’m doing yet. And we also decided on a name, a name I was kicking around today but finally tried out on Brenda just tonight: Primo. Brenda loved it and we started trying it out on our new smelly houseguest.

Primo. First. Emma came first in our lives, but Primo is our first dog, our first boy. And he farts. I love him.

Primo.

(as good a name as Primo is, this dog is Hooper; read on…)

After our heartbreaking experience at the shelter on Sunday, I woke up Monday to an email from my friend Elissa who works at the Humane Society; Emma’s ashes were ready to be picked up. So yesterday after work I headed back to the shelter, to pick up what was left of Emma in a little cardboard box. I instantly felt guilty about having been there the day before, to look for new animals while Emma still hadn’t been returned to us.

It sounds exceedingly corny, but I think we needed to wait for Emma to come home, to lead us to the next animal to care for.

I say this because with the little cardboard box cradled in my left hand, Elissa and I strolled down to the dog adoption area to see if anything new had arrived. Of course I knew some had, since I had the RSS feed for the Humane Society’s adoptable animals loaded in my feedreader and I had been keeping one eye trained on it all day. And that is why I knew that there was a little five month-old Labrador & Border Collie mix named Hooper milling around in there somewhere.

Didn’t take me long to find him, and it took even less time than that to fall in love with him. I went home, got Brenda and we went rocketing back to the Humane Society, where we petted little Hooper and immediately placed a hold on him. Having been neutered that day, we could not take him out of his kennel, so we came back today on my lunch break and spent some leash time with him, melted a little more, and decided to commit to this insane agreement to raise a dog. We’re looking forward to it, we are doing all we can to educate ourselves, and tomorrow when he comes home we’ll start the grand adventure.

This is not an impulse thing. Brenda & I have wanted a dog for a very long time, but living conditions and Emma’s independence had made that a non-option until now. We know these breeds are high-energy. We know we’ll be walking him four times a day. We know he will eat stuff he’s not supposed to, and crap it out the other end where he’s not supposed to. We know there’s a lot more to know and learn. But we’re ready to have a go at this. A crate is set up. Chew toys and kibbel are in da house. Tomorrow night, we bring Hooper home, and start thinking about his new name, but I have to say, Hooper—the name and the dog—is starting to grow on me already.