One of the biggest pleasures in my life are my two dogs, both from the Psychos R Us School of Canines. I have two of these puppy dogs. Actually they are both older but I am not sure wiser dogs.

Sammy is the older of the two, about 8 years old, and a black labrador mix, the biggest sweetie ever put on the Earth. He is about 70 pounds of pure love, not a mean bone in his body. Even though he does like to woof at anything that moves and then trot off to woof at something else.

Jensen is our latest acquisition, rescued from a life of endless kennel time. He is 57 pounds of sneaky love. We think he is a mix of Jack Russell Terrier and Springer Spaniel. Looks a lot like the RCA Nipper dog, same brown patch over his eyes, and just as curios. He came to us by way of my sister the realtor from one of her clients who decided that they no longer wanted him or their other dog and were going to put them in a pound. My sister’s heart which is bigger than the State of Missouri, could not allow this, so she called us, and we became new proud parents.She kept the other dog to complement her own old dog.

We like to refer to Jensen as our devil dog. He tends to get into things he shouldn’t but it does make life more interesting.

One note, we tend to call him “Jimmy” after several months because my sister said his name was “Jimpson”. Until one day when my sister brought us some papers on the dog and we realized after month’s of calling him “Jimpson and Jimmy” his name was actually “Jensen”. Confused yet? So are we.

Anyway back to Jimmy, he is a big cuddler. He loves to crawl up on your lap, or next to you when you are laying down, and then snuggle his head under you. He also tends to be a rubbery dog. He likes to lie, draped over you with the seemingly impossible positions that make him appear to have not nary a bone in his body.

He also sheds ginormous amounts of hair. I have never seen any animal shed more than his own weight in hair on an hourly basis. Think I am kidding? Try vacuuming around the livingroom and within a few minutes, it looks like a the great blizzard just dropped in and left its mark.

Sammy needs constant love, day in and day out, or actually second by second. He is constantly jabbing his nose into you letting you know you are not paying enough attention to his world. He also is still not thrilled with us acquiring a rival for our affections.

Jimmy has begun picking up Sammy’s bad habits, and is beginning to vie for his own attention. It is becoming a big battle daily with each dog trying to get more love than the other.

Sammy loves to fetch balls, toys, even empty bottles, and Jimmy begins to get jealous and barks out his frustrations. We have tried to teach Jimmy to fetch, but his idea of fetching is to grab the ball away and go over and lie down with it. I am not sure if he is too dumb to learn or too smart to be fooled into chasing the stupid ball. Who is the really dumb bell here, huh?

Sammy has also acquired the new name the “Pasta Piranha”. This noble title has been bestowed on him by my wife due to a new peculiar habit he has started.  One night while eating spaghetti, I held a piece up for him to eat, and he attacked this pasta like a school of piranhas taking down a full grown oxen. Snap, snap,snap in a full ferocious attack and the pasta was gone, but luckily not my fingers in the process (I did check thoroughly even so). What makes this particularly amusing is normally Sammy takes food from you very gently. Film to be shown at a later date.

More coming on these two knuckleheads in future posts.