Meet Moses

My brother James brought home a new puppy last week. His name is Moses and he is cute, as you can see from this photo.



Moses is a Puggle - his mother is a Beagle and his father is a Pug. After a bit of research, James discovered that Puggles are quite the fashionable dog these days - but not so fashionable as to be deemed "hot" by the likes of Paris Hilton, thankfully. This popularity might explain why we had to travel to one of the most remote parts of South Carolina.

James and I drove to the blink-and-you'll-miss-it town of Cross Hill to pick up wee Moses. The drive took way longer than we anticipated and included several borderline-legal u-turns. Our directions, it turned out, were cryptic at best. When we finally found the post office that signaled our turn into Cross Hill, we had listened to the new Coldplay album 3 1/2 times. When we pulled up to the house, a young girl in a pale pink dress sitting on the front porch caught my eye. For a split second I thought we had taken a really wrong turned and ended up in Eldorado, Texas. Alas, we had not. The kind family raising their first "batch" of Puggles were Mennonites, which explained their adamant policy of no sales on Sunday.

Moses was the calmest puppy on the porch that afternoon. Looking back now, I think his calm demeanor may have been mistaken for heat stroke. The porch harbored the bright afternoon sun turning it into an easy-bake oven. Today Moses is a wild puppy with a taste for toes. He bites anything and everything around him, including the hand that feeds him. He also is a bit confused with when and where he can use the toilet. But all of this is to be expected with a little pup. At least this is what the puppy books tell me.