A Beautiful Sunrise; When is Pup Poop Too Soft? Pup's Favorite Food (Hint: It's not Alpo)

5:30 AM. Somewhere a dog is howling. Good thing I don't own a gun...

Oh wait, the dog is here in the crate next to my bed. How could I be angry at this little caramel creampuff? I could not! Hoping to let The Reverand sleep another hour, I toss my coat on over my pajamas, pull Louie out of his crate and rush him out to the lawn, so he can relieve himself.

But, how sensitive is this? He doesn't need to go! He just wants to watch the sun rise. Well, it’s a great sunrise all right, streaks of purple and orange, clouds like puffs of cotton. A beautiful sunrise, and yet I find it difficult to enjoy, standing there barefoot in the dewy grass, freezing my butt off.

Then, quite suddenly, a period of furious activity!

Unfortunately it involves chewing on my drenched pajama cuffs and humping my leg. Why is he humping my leg? He doesn’t even have testicles. He’s never seen dog porn. How does he know?

Finally, he poops! But is the stool too soft? In fact, I have no idea what puppy poop is supposed to look like. I proceed to make the second major mistake of the morning: I go online to see how serious the problem is and what can be done. Never—I repeat, never look up the symptoms of a disease online; this goes double for "what can go wrong when you get a dental implant."

www.SuddenPuppyDeath.com recommends rice boiled with chicken breast, so I'm off to Stop & Shop. The Sush rice is only a bit more expensive than Carolina, and organic chicken is probably a good idea since Louie is only a baby. I return home and start boiling the water. I don’t normally do this kind of thing.

I put the cooked rice in a bowl and set it out beside his crate. Louie sniffs at it, and I decide to go back to work while he makes up his mind whether it's worth his attention. I have devoted enough time on Le Petit Prince (I'm sorry, am I starting to sound resentful? It's nobody's fault but my own. I could have gotten the Carolina.) But I am having difficulty concentrating. After a few sentences I press "save" and stroll back to the diningroom to make sure that he hasn't somehow strangled himself on the curtain pull.

It is as though a snowstorm has struck. Floor, crate, bowl, blankey, and much of Louie are covered with sticky clumps of Sushi rice. I clean up. Busy morning.