Dog day afternoon....

During the weekend I dropped by an officemate's house to fix his computer which had been working excrutiatingly slow to the point of uselessness. Two days after his DSL service had been installed, his PC, which had nothing more than a barebone Windows XP installation, had been virtually swamped by viruses, trojans, and malware/adware. Using a broadband connection on an unprotected Windows PC can certainly do that.

While reformatting would have been the easiest way to tackle the problem, there wasn't really enough time to do so. Instead, I managed to return the OS to a workable state by removing the mediocre antivirus program currently installed (actually, it didn't want to uninstall itself, so I had to muck around the registry to get rid of it) and cleaning the hard disk of viruses and malicious software using the free version of avast! antivirus and Spybot Search & Destroy.

As a final touch for enhanced stability and security, I also installed Windows XP Service Pack 2.

So what does this blog entry have anything to do with dog day afternoons? Well, over lunch, this officemate of mine and I talked about canines. You see, one of his hobbies is breeding and selling specific breeds of dogs. I mentioned something in passing about my son always asking me to get a dog for him. I was planning to get him one eventually, but I could never really find a dog (or dog breed) that seemed suitable. I wanted it to be relatively small (so my son wouldn't hurt himself), low maintenance (since my son isn't always at home with me, and I would probably have to take care of it myself over the weekdays), and with a pleasant temperament.

After giving this description, my officemate volunteered one of his dogs, a male Miniature Pinscher, or minipin/minpin for short named Bubu/Boo Boo.

Strangely enough, it seemed to meet my requirements exactly. Small in stature, very fine coat of hair which didn't neede much attention, and a playful and curious temperament reflective of the breed's classification as a toy dog/lap dog.

I appreciated the offer, but initially turned it down. Minpins can be quite expensive, with good specimens fetching upwards of P15,000.00. It didn't seem right to accept such an expensive dog. He insisted though that I take it, so I did.

And a pretty good specimen it was. It had a predominantly black coat with red fringes around the legs and face, a fit and trim torso and a muscular stance. It also acts like a tough guy, that is, until it crosses paths with a bigger dog, or even a cat, in which case it runs as fast with all the flair and bravado as a miniature race horse. And it looks like one too, with it's floppy ears (which aren't cropped), long snout, and massive brown eyes.

I was never really much of a dog person, and in fact I have never owned a dog of my own ever since. But seeing how this dog acted around people, and seeing how dogs of this breed can have real human-like qualities, I guess I may actually have a tiny bit of dog lover inside me. I gave it to my son, and he just loves it.

I'm not really sure how my officemate spelled this dog's name before, but we settled on Boo Boo, after Yogi Bear's sidekick.

So, to cut a long story short, I left the house to fix a colleague's computer, and went home with a dog. And a cute one at that. Life is certainly full of surprises. :-)

Boy (yeah, that's my officemate's name), if you're reading this, thanks for the dog! :-)