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What’s In A Name?

A picture of Avy standing in Frank's pond

A lot of people ask me where Avy got her name. It’s somewhat unique (although it’s often mistaken for Abby) and suits her perfectly.

The process of picking Avy’s name was more difficult than I’d like to admit. I thought it’d be easy, after all how hard is it to come up with a dog’s name? The answer to that question is apparently VERY hard. I wanted a name that was appropriate for a big dog (fluffy just wasn’t going to cut it), that suited her goofy personality and reflected my personality a little bit. So off I went to the Internet to do searches of popular dog names. I looked at names for German Shepherds, active names, names in other languages… It seems there is a name list out there for just about every possibility. Still nothing seemed to fit.

Then I hit on the idea of giving her an outdoorsy name. I love to spend time outside…running, hiking, skiing, rock climbing and I was hoping Avy would be joining me. Since most of the activities involved mountains I started looking for a mountain themed name. First I tried “mogul” (as in those bumps we like to ski over on the mountain) but that didn’t suit. Then I tried “alpine”. That also crashed and burned. Finally I came up with “Avy” short for Avalanche. Skiing and backcountry skiing are top of my list of things to do, and Avalanche seemed like a perfect fit for my high energy puppy.

So just like that Avy had her name…it’ suits her to a tee and thankfully the days of trying to find the perfect fit (and annoying every one of my friends in the process) are behind me.

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