What kind of dog am I?

When I posed this question to M on our walk a few days ago, he pretended not to understand what I was getting at. "A high-maintenance one," he replied.

"Work with me," I said. "You know how different people's ancestors might be Chinese or African or French or something neat like that? Well, that's what I want to know about myself. What's my ethnicity?" I raised my leg and whizzed on a fire hydrant.

"That's easy," he said. "European!"

Some days you can't pay him to be serious.

It must have got him to thinking, though, because today a Doggie DNA Kit arrived in the mail, and before you could say double helix, M and J were holding me in a headlock and swirling little bitty brushes on sticks around inside my mouth. My samples will go out tomorrow, and hopefully we'll know in a few weeks just what kind of dog I am. Besides high-maintenance.

Stay tuned.