The good news is, our friend’s injured dog is apparently doing just great, and is up for adoption.

The bad news is, we won’t be adopting him.

It seems that the friend and more importantly the friend’s daughter are not comfortable with us adopting their dog. They would rather it be adopted by someone else. I’m having trouble understanding this. If I had a pet that I was attached to, and I had to give it up, I would want it to go to someone I knew and trusted, rather than a faceless stranger. But we want to respect their feelings in this matter, so we aren’t going to do it. The decision is perhaps made easier due to the fact that the daughter is close friends with our daughter, and frankly our girl doesn’t have enough friends that we can just start alienating them with impunity.

But still. I have spent the last twenty-plus years wanting a dog, and not getting one. I love dogs, and grew up with an Australian Shepherd/Border Collie mix. She was a delight. I hated leaving her at home when I went to college, and then I had to put her down for health reasons before I went to graduate school. I couldn’t get a dog while I was in graduate school, obviously. Then I was in a rental house, and a newlywed. Pretty soon we had small children. I was never at a point where I thought I would be able to give a dog enough attention that I could justify adopting one. Then out of nowhere we suddenly had to decide whether to adopt this little guy, and all of these ideas about what we could and could not do got all shuffled. The wife and I got used to the idea. As I said previously, we’d never considered getting a dog that was that small, but it would have solved a lot of concerns we had about getting a dog when we have such a small yard. And he was a real cutie.

So now I can’t stop thinking about getting a dog. And again I have to wonder if this is the right time for it. We still can’t get the kids to feed the cats without reminding them–do we really want to bring another dependent into this mix? It doesn’t help that one of the local shelters has an Australian Cattle Dog mix, one of my favorite breeds.

Well, for now we should probably concentrate on getting our bathrooms remodeled. The wife talked to a couple of contractors this morning, and we’ll have to see how much we really want to commit to.