Hello and welcome to the political orphanage, a home for plucky misfits and problem solvers.

I'm your host Andrew Heaton, and I take my dog Wallace, you remember Wallace,

on a couple of walks every day one of the morning and one in the afternoon

usually about 10 minutes before I'm ready to quit working I will be finishing up something and Wallace can psychically

into it when I'm about to be done and he will wander into my office and make his

presence known and interrupt me just 10 minutes before I'm ready and remind me that his

doggy union has negotiated two walks per day and it is time to go on one of those

walks.

And when we first live together, Wallace would just get very frustrated with me.

We'd go on a long walk in the morning, maybe 45 minutes, and we'd go on another walk in the afternoon.

But then at some point he would come into my office and he would be irritated and disturbed,

and he would bound in lugging a piano leg that he stole or a dead animal or something and for a while he had this thing where he'd get tools he'd like bring in he just hit a hammer that he would carry around and so he'd bring it into the house and

he'd make me chase him around because I was afraid he was going to take out a window and

I would get kind of irritated because we'd already spent two hours that day going on a walk.

Well, I feel like I've put in the dog owner time here.

We've done two hours, Wallace. We had the walk. You smelled stuff, you peed on stuff, you urinated your entire body weight

over the course of the one, that really creepy cat, the one-eyed cat that lives in the alley that

looks like it's from a Stephen King novel. we saw that cat, what more do you want?

And it took me a while to realize that for Wallace, walk time and play time are completely different things.

From my perspective they are the same thing.

I'm spending my time for Wallace's benefit.

Pleasant time, I hasten to add, but I do have to balance it with the rest of my day.

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