[Dailydrool] Names

[Douglas Paul]

I guess I will throw my hat into the ring on this great idea. Our first basset was a pet store baby (I know now what I didn't know then about pet shops), anyway I wanted a special name for this sweet gal and at that time I was reading the book 'The Abyss" (soon to be made into a movie) and one of the main characters was a member of the American Association of Medical Instrumentalists (AAMI). My husband (who was in the Navy) was an instructor at the Army Medical Center school for biomedical engineers and AAMI was mentioned in our conversations, thus our baby was named AAMI (pronounced Amy) and so many times her name was spelled wrong, but not a big problem for us. Our second basset was born to friends of ours and the wife kept calling him Barky because he wouldn't stop barking, so while grocery shopping one day (after we agreed on getting this noisy goof)  we came up with Alexander Graham Basset (Alex for short) and he lived up to his name (very vocal). After AAMI went to the bridge, Alex was depressed since we also just moved from Colorado to Kansas, so we decided to find a playmate for Alex. An ad in our local paper was how we found our next adventure. A ball of red and white fur made her way to our home and became Abby (don't know why I came up with that name, but it stayed). Alex left for the bridge which left Abby to be spoiled till the end. When we found ourselves without the pitter patter of basset feet, we went on a online search and found two litters ready to be released to their new homes. We looked at the pups, saw the sire and dam and fell in love with this active young male. We decided to wait until he was 10 weeks old before agreeing to taking him home. We were sitting in an IHOP trying to come up with names that would be appropriate for the breed and since bassets can tend to be rather stubborn, I came up with Stonewall Jackson; thus Stonewall was and is still ours 11 years later. The breeder kept calling us to see if we wanted another basset since they had two litters 5 days apart (dad was very "active"), so after discussing this, we asked if they had a tri-colored female (which they did). So off we went to get Stonewall's half sister. I looked up Stonewall Jackson to find out names of ladies in his life, but no names sparked my interest. So just out of sheer desperation, I came up with Samantha and so she was named. Stonewall and Samantha are a truly bonded pair and they keep us on our toes even though they are 11 years old. They are a joy and at times, total pains in the butt, but we wouldn't trade them in for anything.
Marie Paul