I had friends with dogs and cats that I liked a lot, and they seemed to be comfortable with me. At one point, a person I worked with had found a lost miniature pinscher that had no collar. She couldn't bring it home, so she brought it to work, and I was pretty excited to take it with me. Sweet dog, and obviously well trained. When I called around to the vets, we found the owners almost immediately.
In another, similar episode, there was a black and white cat without a home and I thought it would be nice to have a cat around the house I lived in with Devin (AKA the Luxor). We named it "The Mad Bomber What Bombs at Midnight". Didn't take long before we knew we didn't need a cat after all, and I found a friend who was a willing taker. (That was a happy ending for the Mad Bomber.)
Not long after that, I moved out of DeKalb and into another swarthy bachelor pad, where the other two guys had a dog and a cat (the Mad Bomber, in fact, renamed "Sponge"). That was nine months of living with animals, and I liked it. All of my previous living situations would have been too perilous for a pet.
So after that nine month stint, Jennie and I got married, bought a sweet townhouse in Geneva, and shortly after that, we got Nina.
In the very early days, we didn't have a lot of toys for her and we needed to get to work on training. In the short term, we found out that she loved to chew plastic. She accidentally got hold of some Tupperware and dismantled it, tiny piece by tiny piece. She had no interest in eating it, just chewing it into pieces.
I know puppies chew, but ours was prolific. She had shortened one of the rockers on our chair by a bit before we learned about bitter apple spray. It was a reasonable deterrent, but she was so driven to chew that wood, she'd bite a little, then make a "blegh" face, then shake it off and bite it some more. There were a few compulsions back then.
Another one was sleeping with her head in a shoe. I'm not sure if the smell was comforting, or it felt ergonomically correct to her, but it was a regular occurrence. She also did not like to have any kind of block between her and her people. If we let her outside, she'd jump up and down at the door and yelp until we let her in.
We could also see signs of intelligence that I'd not seen in another dog (well, maybe that farm dog that was on Oprah). I'm sure my memory is compressing and distorting this stuff, but we tried a few different options for her for potty training with little success. But when Jennie put a bell on the door and showed her how to ring it, it really seems like it was only a few days before she was doing it regularly to go outside.
In fact, we were rewarding her for going outside (I remember having treats in all of my pockets all the time), and she pretty quickly learned to game the system. She'd ring the bell, walk down off the deck, then walk right back up without doing anything and ask to come back in so she could collect her treat. Smart! Sometimes I'd let her in and she'd ask to go right back out again.
Another thing that was a little different was how good she was on walks. Everyone (including Puppies For Dummies) warned us that too much walking could be dangerous for a small pup. She learned how to handle the leash immediately (I don't remember any actual training there), and she'd let us know that she wanted to keep going. There were a couple times very early on where she'd sit down at the far end of the bike path and I'd have to carry her home, but not many like that. Within a few months, we'd be knocking off five-mile hikes regularly.
Our townhouse happened to be an end unit, and the sliding doors looked out over a park. A few nights a week, a bunch of dog owners would bring their dogs and let them play there. They were all excellent dogs, and well-behaved, so it was pretty fun to let little Nina run around with them and socialize. She loved it, for sure.
Our next-door neighbor was a police officer and his dog, Buster, was a drug and cadaver sniffer for the county sheriff. Nina and Buster got along very well, and there was another dog named Jade who lived on the other side of the park. The three of them did lots and lots of playing that first year.
Off the park, there was also a bike path, and we walked it regularly. Nina became pretty good friends with a dog from the other end of the path. Bolt would visit the park when the group assembled, but sometimes came down on walks just with her owner. We'd usually see them walking and come out to say hello so Nina and Bolt could play. Nina was much faster than Bolt, so they did more wrestling than chasing. Nina won a lot when they were both puppies, but when Bolt grew into her solid beagle body later on, the tides eventually turned her way.
It was a great dog neighborhood for a year or more.
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