Introducing Burton Guster!

On Wednesday I went to the animal shelter to volunteer. While I was there, they called to tell me that our puppy was ready to go home! I put him is the passenger seat for the ride home, but by the time we got home, he was stretched across the center console with his head on my leg. He was pretty scared at first – we set him down in the entry way and he just stood there, frozen for about 15 mins.

Since then he has perked up a lot! He follows me wherever I go. I think he is fast asleep, but as soon I get up, he’s up. Gus is still warming up to Stephen.

Two sleepy animals!

JD and Gus get along pretty well, I think mainly because Gus is not too hyper. He does growl and bark at JD while wagging his tail, but JD ignores him (typical cat) for the most part.

Hungry, hungry puppy!

Now that he is used to us, we want to socialize him as much as possible so that he will not be so timid around people. Saturday we went to our church’s fall fest and then to Petsmart. The entire day was a success! He did well with the different people and he wanted to make friends with all the other doggies at Petsmart. We got some puppy food for large breeds (he’s a black lab mix) so hopefully he will start getting big and stong!

My pre-washer

Sunday we met up with Ryan, a friend of S’s from work, to play some frisbee golf. UCF has a pretty nice course, and we brought Gus along. He wasn’t too interested in the frisbees (frisbi?) but almost every time the boys threw one, he would run towards them barking! It was so funny and unexpected. He has a good bark for a little puppy. When we got home he helped me with the dishes.

A wedding, wild children, and a puppy!

I must apologize for the dearth of updates recently. I was out of town for a week at the beginning of October for the wedding of Miss Hanna Watson, now Mrs. McWhorter! Hanna and I have been friends since second grade, and it was so special to be part of her wedding. She got married in Fort Worth, so that meant I also got to hang out with my family. I went to College Station to see Mere, and drove down to Corpus Christi with Kelsey. In the span of 5 days, I was in Austin, Georgetown, College Station, Fort Worth, and Corpus! Those of you who know the great state of Texas know that that is a lot of driving!

I have also started substitute teaching with some regularity. After covering classes from 3rd grade all the way to seniors in high school, I am very impressed with elementary school teachers. I am exhausted after one day of trying to keep control of 22 9-year-olds. I can’t imagine doing it for an entire school year. High school is much easier. They know how they are supposed to act with a sub, and most of the time they do it. Having a sub does not throw their entire day into chaos, like it does with the little ones. It is kind of fun to actually teach the elem kids something. With hs, I give them their assignment and they go to it, usually not much teaching involved. My best class so far was a 9th grade honors English class. Since they were 9th graders, they were still kind of in awe of high school, and they were honors, so they were serious about learning, and it was an English class, so they read silently the entire period. It was wonderful. I didn’t have to tell them to keep it down once!

Now about this puppy… we’re getting one! We are now officially adoptive parents. The newest Messmann is a 4 month old black lab-mix. He is super skinny, you can count all his ribs! He has obviously been on his own for a while, so we are dying give him lots of love and food! I have been volunteering at the Orange County Animal Services shelter for a couple months now, and on Saturday S and I decided to go look at the animals. If we saw a dog, great, if we didn’t, we’d go back some other time. Well of course we found a dog we were interested in, so we took him out to interact with him. I was so impressed, because even though he is so skinny and doesn’t have much energy because of that, when we rolled a tennis ball, he went and got it, brought it to me, and dropped it! Even my family’s dog, Hank, who is 5, will not drop the ball for you. The puppy will even make eye contact with you, which is really good for a stray who probably hasn’t had much good human interaction.

We have decided that we are going to name all of our animals after characters in our favorite tv shows. The cat is John Dorian, or JD, from the show Scrubs. The puppy will be Burton Guster, or Gus, from the show Psych. We should be able to bring him home on Friday! John Dorian’s world is about to be blown apart!