As I mentioned in the post about Cara, I started dogwalking at the Humane Society back in December.  I’ve never done volunteer work that I enjoyed, really…I’ve always felt like I was just standing around, unsure of what to do, unhelpful.  I think I’d chalk that up to most volunteer programs not being well-organized.  But that is so not the case with dogwalking, and I LOVE it.  Can’t imagine my life without it. 

It’s one of those things I always wanted to do and always talked about doing, but for some reason I just didn’t, and I can’t believe I waited so long.  But on that very first Tuesday night I did it, I was hooked. And now I’m doing it every Tuesday and Friday (well, almost every Tuesday–more about that later) and I HATE when I have to miss it.  I feel out of sorts.  It’s such a huge stress reliever.  It doesn’t matter what kind of terrible mood I’m in when I get there; as soon as I get that first ecstatic dog out of his kennel to go play, it turns around almost instantly.

Here are a few of the dogs I’ve grown to know and love over the last few months…

Sadler. Funnily enough, the dog who has his head stuck in a frisbee here is the same evil genius who can open the gate in the play yards! When I realized this, I started putting a small metal latchy thing in the gate, and his reaction the first time he went to open that gate was priceless. He was so surprised to have been outsmarted! 

 

I love Marina so much. She is probably one of my top ten favorite dogs in life. She got adopted a few weeks ago, and it was the first time one of my favorites got adopted. I had to let myself be selfish and sad for a few days…but I have to be happy that she has a good home now. 

 

Margie is such an awesome dog. She loves to just hang out, lean on you, get belly rubs, and give kisses. She gets feisty around other dogs, but she has been known to get along with a few laid-back boys who acknowledge that she’s in charge.

Of course, her eyes ARE made of lime green lasers, so if that makes you uncomfortable, she might not be the dog for you.

(Flickr’s red-eye tools couldn’t quite handle the magnitude of these nighttime dog eyes…)

Axl is the cocker spaniel’s name, how appropriate. He is the sweetest little boy, he loves to be in your lap and if he has to scale baby gates to make that happen, don’t think he won’t! He and Smiley both were adopted not long after they got to the Humane Society. Yay!

After my wedding in April 2008, I found myself with all this free time on my hands.  What would I do to fill those HOURS I had spent agonizing over chair rentals and linens and catering?  Charles quickly noticed that often, that free time was spent crawling all over him, telling him to entertain me and such.  He realized that I needed a dog.  When we got married and I moved into his house, I was moving away from my boys…Oscar and Blue.  They lived with me at my mom’s house for almost two years, and I was having major dog withdrawals.

But alas, we were waging war on credit card debt and kicking its ass, so Charles made the case for not getting a dog until said war was over.  I reluctantly agreed to wait.  But I couldn’t stop myself from spending hours on petfinder.com, making ridiculous noises at every dog that came up.  Somehow I ended up at the Humane Society.  I had always wanted to volunteer there, but just never had for one lame reason or another.  But I kept being drawn there.

I signed into the book at the front desk and walked through the kennels.  On my very first walk through, I locked eyes with her.  Cara, a floppy-eared hound dog, eyebrows drawn up in a worried, frantic expression, calling out to me: "It’s you! YOU are my person–finally, you came!"  She was sitting on a bench in her kennel staring intently at me through the glass, butt wiggling in complete desperation.

I almost cried because I knew Charles didn’t want us to have a dog yet.  So I decided that day I was going to start volunteering as a dogwalker.

I went home that night and told Charles all about Cara and he listened and responded cautiously–careful not to say anything to get my hopes up.  But every time I went to dogwalking, I came home talking about her.  And finally he just realized that it was not a passing thing–that Cara was our dog.  She decided that.  And I had very little to do with it.

So we took her home on January 16, 2009.  She totally tricked us the first week into thinking she was a perfectly behaved dream dog.  Her death bark, for example, took us by surprise when it first surfaced.  She decided she wasn’t going to be sleeping in a kennel at night anymore when there was a perfectly good bed right there in the room with her.  The bark that she unleashed on us was powerful and painful.  Shrill and high-pitched, the death bark is meant to convince all within earshot that she is being tortured.  It was a weapon for which we had no defense, and we let her know that when we let her out of the kennel.  Thank goodness the death bark is reserved mainly for situations that seriously offend her.  It’s intense.