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My company hit its revenue goal for the year so I got a Christmas bonus. I wanted to buy myself something fun with the money. I was in the mood for something electronic so we went to Curcuit City and walked around the store. It was weird because I looked around and thought to myself “I could buy anything I want here with no problem” (except the really big plasma TVs). It was a strange feeling to be able to afford an expensive toy. The problem was that now that i had the opportunity I couldn’t find any thing I actually wanted.

So the hunt continued. We went to the mall and walked around the whole thing. Again, every store I walked into I said to myself “Okay, basically anything in this store you can buy, just pick something.” I couldn’t find anything. It was all remote control UFO’s or “just-add-water snow” or a really expensive sweater, blar blar blar.

I wanted something more.

Saturday I morning I had a brilliant idea: we should get a puppy! We’d been talking about getting a puppy for a while and we thought a beagle would be a good idea. So Ash and I talked about it and I found a breeder in Victorville that had some ready to take home for Christmas. Perfect. There was still one problem though, we read that beagles can get lonely if they are left alone for long periods of time. Since we both work we were kind of worried this would happen to our dog. So then I got my second great idea:

We should get two puppies!

Not only would they keep each other company, the breeder was offering $100 off if you bought two to encourage this companionship. By now I was really excited. We drove an hour and a half to Victorville and picked up our friend Bekah and took her to the breeders house.

We picked out two male puppies, one from Group A and one from Group B. We put them in the back seat of our new car and they fell asleep. We think its funny when dogs have human names so we named them Herrold and Albert. Everything was right with the world.

That is, until we got them home.

As soon as the dogs were in our house the following list became very clear:

5 Reasons why we shouldn’t have a dog (right now)
5) We’re never home - We thought that this wouldn’t be a big issue if we got two. While this helps with the dog’s loneliness it just means they can chew twice as many pieces of furniture.
4) Our house is small - Even a little smell fills up the entire house.
3) We live on a second story - This means when they start to go on the floor we have to pick them up, walk down a flight of stairs and then find a patch of grass. By this time the pee is spread along all of that path and some is on my clothes.
2) We don’t have a yard - This means every time the dogs need to go outside we have to go with them and they have to be on a leash the entire time.
1) We have to pick up their “lawn-treats” in a bag.

That’s when we got The Fear. We realized that our lives were suddenly strapped to our house and these dogs. Our friends were going to ask us, “Want to come over sometime tonight?” Nope. No-can-do, gotta go home and take out the dogs.

We put the dogs in their crate and they only whined for about 5 minutes. But we barely slept. All we could think about was if the breeder would take them back in the morning. Ashley said that if he took them and only gave us $1 it would be worth it. I wasn’t ready to give them up so cheaply, but I wasn’t looking forward to trying to sell them either. I called the breeder in the morning and thankfully he let us return them and gave us most of the money back.

I was sad to leave Herrold and Albert, but I knew it was the right thing. Bekah left her keys in our car so we dropped them off at her house on our way out of town.

If you’re interested in beagle pups you can see the breeders website here. I guess the moral of the story is “Don’t impulse-buy something that can poop on your floor.”

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 28th, 2006 at 9:16 am and is filed under dogs, family, fun. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.