God this game is so freaking good. Just got my house and found a dog at the same time. Basically I have it setup so that my virtual dog greets me whenever i head home to drop off adventuring supplies.
A cool tip too if you are using the controller is that you can assign favourates to your left and right d-pad. Just go into your fav menu and hold either the left or right d-pad to make it a quick select when you hit either button. Makes switching from a sheild -> healing spells on the off had that much easier.
This also made me lol: