I’m beginning to suspect that my dog is rather intelligent. He’s also remarkably devoted to my mom, which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to the rest of us. Anyhoo, yesterday evening my mom was on the couch watching TV. Marin and I were downstairs on our computers, when Yoshi (yes, my parents won the naming battle) hopped on downstairs. He ran over to us, made sure we saw him, and then ran back upstairs (we might have written this off as “looking for Mom,” but he should have already known where she was). We went upstairs, where we found Yoshi waiting and watching us.

I think he was testing our reaction to his trip downstairs.

Yeah, so Yoshi’s finally relaxing some. He now wanders around the house (instead of hovering around his cushion), greets Mom in the morning, licks our hands when we pet him, lies down and doesn’t always jolt when somebody moves, and so on. He also seems to understand that he shouldn’t make messes in the house (he hasn’t peed once inside—even overnight!—that we know of), which was a pleasant thing to discover.

Today, again, my promotional Pepsi/iTunes Big Gulp asked me to Please Try Again. If I don’t win a song tomorrow, I’m going to cry foul about this “one in three” win business.