One more sleep and I'm a dog owner! I'm as excited as an excited person.

I still haven't done anything about tidying the house after the flooring onslaught -- why bother when it's only going to get dusty and dirty again? Next week will do. Tonight I'll set up the dog's "room" -- the wide part of the hallway by the back door. Bed on one side, food dishes on the other. I meant to get a piece of board for the stairgate but forgot. I could always cut a few bits of floorboard to size and slot them in I guess. This is to keep the dog downstairs until I'm sure he's toilet trained. But if he's lived in kennels he might not even know about stairs.

Leading suggestions for a new name: Bing (my favourite) and Kuri (Pinky's suggestion; Maori for dog). Pinky dismissed Jack and Finn McCool as too fashionable. So we're looking for something that is even MORE fashionable, ie fashionably unpopular. How awful if I called him something really great and it immediately became popular. There's this sort of trajectory to fashion, isn't there -- you start out with the situation that no-one in their right mind would name their child Mabel -- it's a granny's name, musty and mothballed. And you end up with kindie kids being Mabel C. and Mabel F. because there are so many of them. It goes rare/unpopular/uncool, uncommon/unpopular/cool, more common/more popular/still cool, common/popular/uncool, common/unpopular/uncool and back to the start. Also there's the age thing -- if your granny and her friends are all Mabel you name your baby Chantelle; if your granny's Chantelle you call your baby Mabel.

I'd better do some work.