Hostage to a 4-pound dog

Jamison with his keeper

It's been two and a half weeks and young Jamison is settling in well. He has us trained in his service and we are meeting his every need. We think he was in shock for the first couple of days -- he was wary and did a lot of staring, and of course who could blame him. It would be like me, for example, waking up one morning to find myself on the Serengeti tended to by kindly elephants. 

Ms. V has been a warrior on his behalf, enrolling him in a class, taking him to the vet, procuring special foods, and taking him out to do his business six or eight times a day, including at least twice in the middle of every night. She has slid into a kind of baby talk with him that is barely comprehensible, but he is, like, in love with her, and even tolerates me in short polite intervals, which is about what I deserve. He travels with V everywhere, including to see her mother -- two hours each way -- and is pretty content to ride it out in a little crate, where he also sleeps at night, propped on a couple of chairs so he can see his momma all night long. 

He understands the world mostly through his mouth -- that is, seeing something is not quite enough; he has to taste it, chew it, see what it's made of. He has accumulated quite a few toys and he likes nothing better than to have to retrieve a thrown squeaky toy or a plastic bone. He runs fast, paws flying, skitters to a stop, picks up the toy and races back to drop it on his red T-shirt or his pad, whichever he has designated as his nightly Base of Operations. In the hours before bed he gets so wound up, scrambling here and there, we call it the Nighttime Crazies, and it's better than TV. 

POSTSCRIPT: We have appointments for vaccines this week, and we are excited! We used this link: https://mke-vaccines.egov.com/  It may require you to be a City of Milwaukee resident.