Blastoff!

Peter has piled the things we'll need on the trip upstate: dog crate, Ipods, lists of questions for the brothers, Elizabeth's thank-you note (hand-drawn, signed as coming from the whole family), Michael's thank-you (pasted together on the computer, self-signed).

Serendipity marked last evening. With 18 hours left before picking up the pup, we watched a PBS nature program called Dogs That Changed the World. For as long as I can remember, I've thought of dogs as just pets that people indulge themselves with, that working dogs are the exception. The show laid that notion to rest. Dogs deveoped out of wolvesonly about 15,000 years ago. They evolved because of the emergence of cities and their midden hiaps. The wolves least afraid of popel, the tamest, wre most successful at feeding. In mating with each other, they rapidly evolved into proto-dogs, probably within a single person's lifetime. Humans quickly grasped their usefulness and civilization then developed in ways that would have been impossible without canines: large herds, penetrating into the Arctic, and so on.

It must have had an effect on Michael, too: as we later watched a bit of the monks' training video and saw Br. Mark elevate one of the puppies in a mild stress test, he suddenly said, "We could call her Ella." (Now that's a name we could live with.)

Elizabeth: "But I like Josie."

And so we're off.