BAN #409: Introducing Daisy!

14 March 2022 Issue #409

March 14, 2022

Subscribers are as delightful as a puppy romping around in a new room.

Personal Stuff

Happenings chez BA

So on Saturday this happened.

[Daisy! Credit: Phil Plait]

Yup. We got ourselves a dog!

I love dogs as much as any typical Earth human, but my wife LOVES dogs. LOVES. Our last dog, Moxie, died a little over a year ago after a long, happy life, and for most of the time since then we had way too much going on to be able to handle another. But things change.

Marcella really missed having a dog around, and it wasn’t too hard to see that look in her eye. So we talked about it, and pretty quickly decided to start the process. She started looking for rescue dogs in the Denver area, and it didn’t take too long to find Daisy.

[Marcella and Daisy. Credit: [Phil Plait]

We were lucky; we found her the first day she became available online and were literally the first people to put our names in the hat. And we were super lucky to find that her foster home wasn’t far from us — Denver is a big area, and it could’ve easily been an hour and a half drive for us. Instead it was just minutes.

For those who don’t know, there are different ways this can work, but in Daisy’s case she was born in Texas and she and her littermates were given up to a shelter… but it was a kill shelter, one that will euthanize animals if they can’t find homes rapidly enough. However, there are networks of people — heroes — in different areas who will get them from the shelter and temporarily foster the dogs in their homes. For puppies that usually means making sure they get their vaccinations, get vet visits, and are spayed/neutered. Plus the usual loving/playing/general-taking-care-of-them. Once they’re old enough the foster network will then put the puppy bona fides online so people can look and find one they like.

[Daisy investigating one of the eight million rabbits in our yard on her very first outing after we got home. The little logs are plugs of dirt; we just had our lawn aerated. Credit: Phil Plait] 

There are older dogs too, of course, and we considered that, but my wife loves training dogs, and we want to get a second one in the near future, and from our experience with puppies it’s easier to get them to accommodate adding another dog.

So we went to visit her at the foster home. She’s 12 weeks old, a mutt of uncertain lineage, and likely to be medium sized (probably under 20 kilos, but who knows) when she’s all growed up. We loved her right away, and my wife was on her phone and submitting the adoption fee in the car on the way home. We had to wait a couple of days for the paperwork to go through and for the puppy to get spayed. That was on Friday, and on Saturday we picked her up and brought her home with us.

She’s cheerful, playful, curious, sniffy, and if I lie down next to her on the floor she immediately jumps on my head and starts nipping my beard like she’s trying to get bugs out of it (for the record I very rarely have bugs in it). We bought her a bunch of toys and chewy things, and her favorite is an actual cow bone.

[OM NOM NOM. Credit: Phil Plait]

We also have gear from our old dogs, and she already loves one of the beds. She has a little trouble with pooping in the house but she has really good bladder control, and we’ll have that settled pretty quickly; she’s bright and attentive. We’ll keep her in a cage by our bed at night for a while until we’re sure she’s trained to go outside when she needs to excrete the usual various bodily excretions.

She took to the cage right away last night despite sleeping in a bed at the foster home, so that’s fantastic. We have a little comfy bed in there for her, a piddle pad in case she can’t hold it (she didn’t need it last night), and a chew toy. But she slept almost all the way through the night, only waking up once and whining a bit. We reassured her and went right back to sleep.

How did we get so lucky?

As for her name, Marcella wanted something a little old-fashioned like from the 1940s. Mable, Dottie, Vera… but then she thought of Daisy and that was that. When she mentioned Dotty I said Speck isn’t bad, but then I realized the greatest name for a dog of all time is Amazing Larry.

She was pretty firm about no, but we want to get a boy puppy in the next few months so they have playmates, and I may stand firm on Amazing Larry.

That’ll be a little while though. We’re reading about when it’s best to introduce a second dog, and every site has different advice (note: We’re not looking for advice, thanks, because literally no one agrees and everyone has different anecdotal “data”, so we’ll likely be playing it by ear once we know she’s settled).

Until then, we plan on having lots of fun with Daisy. Because of course she’s the best dog in the whole world.

[Daisy and me. Credit: Phil Plait]

Blog Jam

[The ultra-diffuse dwarf galaxy NGC 1052-DF2, seen here using Hubble, apparently has little or no dark matter. New simulations show how this may have happened. From Wednesday’s article. Credit: NASA, ESA, STScI, Zili Shen (Yale), Pieter van Dokkum (Yale), Shany Danieli (IAS) Image processing: Alyssa Pagan (STScI)]

Monday 7 March, 2022:

Tuesday 8 March, 2022:

Wednesday 9 March, 2022:

Thursday 10 March, 2022:

Friday 11 March, 2022:

Et alia

You can email me at [email protected] (though replies can take a while), and all my social media outlets are gathered together at about.me. Also, if you don’t already, please subscribe to this newsletter! And feel free to tell a friend or nine, too. Thanks!

Reply

or to participate.