Day 2

Good news! I got home and the kitchen was intact. I looked and felt around for urine or urine residue and found none. I immediately took him outside and he did great peeing outside (in the snow even).

He still likes to jump up on the furniture without being invited. That's a big issue. He's listening to the off command pretty well, but he's not understanding that he's not supposed to get up in the first place. In fact I'm pretty sure he's Russian and that his name is actually Larryoff Goodoff.

He did well with feeding at dinner time. I ate first and he left me alone just fine. Looked at me a lot, but didn't come near. I took him to the kitchen and gated it and stood there with him for 15 minutes. I gave him some mild encouragement to eat and drink but otherwise watched the TV in the other room through the doorway. He dawdled around for quite a while, but with about 5 minutes to go, he got down to business and ate his bowl of food. I still have some concerns that he might not be drinking enough, but that might be all in my head.

The downer last evening was that I waited about 2 minutes too long to take him out after feeding. I thought I could let him go 15 minutes but it was only about 12 or 13. I saw him start hunching over and I tried to startle him by clapping and saying no, but to no avail (he poops a lot faster than I do!).

The acclimation to the crate is going very well. He'll do darn near anything for a Bil Jac treat.

Heather brought him a bunch of new toys and we're going to parcel them out slowly.

We played for a while during the evening and then we tried to get him to chill out. But he's got a lot of energy. I think that's where a lot of jumping on the furniture comes from. I'm sure more exercise (and once the testosterone goes down since he's newly neutered) will cure some of that. It's just hard to go for more than a 20 minute walk or so right now because it's really cold.

At bedtime, he did his circling the bed routine and kept putting his forepaws on the bed. We kept knocking his paws off and telling him off. Eventually, he just circled and circled and then went to his bed.