Day two. Names, and settling in.

We needed to settle on a name.  The rescue people called him Calvin, but there was no way that dog was a Calvin. He had a white-tipped tail, white paws with speckles, a crooked white smudge down his nose. His belly was swirled with white, like marble rye bread. My first thought was Angus. But I kept thinking of Charles Siebert's sad book, "Angus," about his dog, who was attacked by wild animals and crawled home to die. It's a wonderful book, written through the point of view of the dog, but it is based on a true story and I wasn't sure I could doom a dog to that name.

So I put that name out of my mind.

Roscoe? Roddy? Roddy Doyle? Rudy? Rudy Johnson? We tried name after name, mostly R names but not exclusively (Larry?) but none was right. I liked Rudy, but it might be because I had almost named Rosie "Ruby." It wasn't quite right for her, and Rudy wasn't quite right for this guy.

And then a friend posted on Facebook, "He looks like an Angus," and that was it. That's his name. He doesn't know it yet, of course, though we say it all the time.

Angus and Rosie play well. She was delighted he was there for the first hour, and then it began to sink in that the little guy wasn't going anywhere. After that, there was a little toy jealousy (we moved the toybox out of reach), and a few snappy corrections (one sent Angus screaming under the table), but mostly there was joy.

He likes his crate, which we haul upstairs every night and back down in the morning. He knows it's his. He is not housebroken--he seems to understand that he's expected to do his business outside, but he doesn't yet know that that also means he is not supposed to do it inside.

He has razor-sharp puppy teeth and puppy claws.  The first night, he screamed a lot and woke up every two hours.  So Day Two was a blur, New Year's Eve, eleven degrees below zero, I was zonked, Doug was zonked, even Rosie was looking a bit glassy-eyed.

But Angus eats well, and sleeps hard, and plays hard, and he seems happy and healthy.