A dog with two addresses

I'm at home, at my parent's place in Melrose, for the weekend.
I have come home largely in order to meet my sister Katy's dog, Scout. Scout is a 4-month-old springer spaniel, born in Mississippi and brought to Georgia as a gift for Katy from Adam (her husband). (She's from Mississippi because he had his mom and sister buy her there and bring her when they came to visit, so it would be a complete surprise for Katy.)

Katy has wanted a dog for years. When we were kids, we had four girls, three cats, two dogs, seventeen chickens, two horses, two rabbits, five hamsters, and three goldfish (highest populations of each, not necessarily all concurrent, though nearly so). So we were used to a full house. It has been difficult for each of us to adjust, going away to college and simply not having animals around.
Katy wanted to get a dog but, given how Army life is, never was settled enough to really justify getting one. Even after they bought the house in Georgia, knowing they'd be at Ft. Stewart for 3 years, she sadly decided that she couldn't quite justify getting a dog.
But Adam knew she really wanted one, so he got her one.

At the moment, both Adam and Katy are on training manouevers in Ft. Polk (when asked where posted, if a soldier's answer is Ft. Polk, the standard response is "I'm so sorry" because it's a Godforsaken place), Louisiana. I hear they're learning kinda cool stuff like how to detect and avoid car bombs and how to cope with civilian rioting and the like-- i don't really know, but it sounds useful.
But, they couldn't bring a dog.

So, Scout (as pre-arranged before she was even purchased) is up in Melrose for the month, adjusting happily to life as a (spoiled!) country dog. Mom loves dogs but has no intention of getting one of her own-- the empty nest means freedom and dammit, she's enjoying that freedom.

Scout is adorable. She is, I am told, the smartest and cleverest and prettiest dog ever. (She is, of course, the Grand-Dog, and is in fact my dog-niece... None of us has had children, so Mom is doing The Grandma Thing in a very restrained fashion.)

However. Oh the biting. She is the biting monster with the biting teeth and the jaws of biting.
She is just getting big enough, and powerful enough, that it hurts when she bites. She gets excited and needs to put her mouth on everything. Well, that means hands. She's bitten me so hard inside my elbow that it left a bruise. She doesn't mean to hurt. She's just excited. This morning she was going intently after my thumbs, and once she had them she was carefully manoevering them into position so she could suck on them. I cleverly determined that if I put a dog toy into her mouth, she'd eat that instead. So she's been shredding an old champagne cork ALL OVER the living room.

I have about a zillion adorable pictures of her, but there isn't an FTP program on this computer (my old Win2K box that I sold to Ann to get my iMac, and she gave to Mom and Dad to get her iBook-- a trend?-- but it's the first adequately powered computer my parents have had in a decade, and it's a nice change to not have to wait 5 full minutes for AOL to load. I mean, to load the program. So that you can then spend 10 minutes going through the sign-in process). Where was I? Oh my, I'm not sure. Oh, not installing an FTP program on this computer. No, it would be rather futile.

Anyway. She is so cute. It is so nice to be in Melrose, but it is FREEZING and won't stop raining, and I can't feel my fingers. Some moron (<--me) left her bedroom window open last night and it was FIFTY-TWO degrees Fahrenheit this morning. AGH.

Dog likes to lie in my lap while she chews things. She likes sitting on people. So she'll happily throw herself headlong into people's laps. Sometimes she misses. And goes THUNK on the floor, and gets up and tries again, totally unfazed. She's quite indestructible.
Dave played with her for a while last night, trying to teach her to guess which hand he had the tennis ball in. All he wound up teaching her was how to walk/run laps around him until he got bored and threw the ball for her.

She is a sweetie, though. If she manages to get over the oral fixation and the TEETH thing, which I think she will... She does have a very delicate mouth, when she's thinking of it. Sometimes she's given wild apples to play with, and she'll chase them around the floor for hours and hardly put a toothmark in them. The other day, Mom had a Band-Aid on top of her foot, and Scout sat down, looked at it, and neatly removed it with her mouth, without biting Mom's foot. She just peeled it off, and spat it out, and looked up at Mom rather pleased with herself.

She's also really cute in a baby sort of way because she's not quite sure how the world fits together. Dave rolled the ball for her and it went behind a chair, so she ran through the door next to the chair to look on the other side of the wall, behind the chair. Mom went down the basement stairs, and Scout, confused, watched her go down, then went and ran up the front stairs (in the same vertical space as the basement stairs, just the next floor up). She's only just figured out that both flights of stairs to the second storey (there's a front stair and a back stair both going up) work for BOTH up AND down, and is very pleased with that realization. She is, after all, just a baby. She was born on May 15th.

Anyway. That's probably enough about cute dog antics. But the title of the post-- she had to get a new collar while up here, because she has grown so much. (On the way up, she weighed 16 pounds. Now she is 25 pounds.) Mom got her tags made. She got two tags. One says:
SCOUT
Melrose, NY
(my parents' phone number)
And the other one, in front of it, says,
SCOUT
Ellabell, GA
(my sister's phone number)

Which I think would be a little confusing if she ran away locally and was found, but it's quite cute to consider a puppy with two addresses. Is one her summer home? Is she that monied?

Hee. She's so cute. Of all possible nieces, I think she's pretty cool, because you can't play fetch with a four-month-old human baby.