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.