Four and Five

At the end of September I attended a fiber festival with my BFF and Ray's old favorites, Caleb and his family. Caleb, who had been interestedly following my attempts at adopting a dog, asked how the search was going. I gave him the latest. Caleb was not surprised at the stories. He had heard similar from people he knew who had tried to adopt dogs.

"We passed a dog rescue about 10 minutes from here," he said while searching his phone for the name of the place, "Here it is."
I could see him scrolling. He turned the phone towards me and showed me a dog.
"How 'bout this one?"
I grinned and said, "Forward it to Greggie."
I pulled out my own phone and called my husband.
"Hey, Caleb is sending you a link to a dog. See what you think, and if you like him, fill out the application."
Gregg agreed to take a look.
That evening when I got home, I asked Gregg what he thought of the dog. He told me he had put in an application. I waited until the next day to call the rescue.

"I have your application right in front of me," said the woman on the other end of the line, "But the dog you have applied for is not cat friendly. We have others who are, if you are interested."

I asked what their adoption process entailed and was told that all members of the household were required to come and meet the dog. Then all members of the household were required to go home and think about it for a couple of days. If, after a couple of days, everyone still wanted the dog, they call the rescue to arrange for the dog to be brought to them. Someone would bring the dog to the house, do a home check, and then if the dog agreed, he was adopted. The whole process took about a week. Being so recently burned by a rescue that gave my dog away while I was following their 48 hour rule, I made a conscious decision to not proceed any further. However, undeterred, I continued to look at dogs.

A couple days later, I found a hound at a rescue that I hadn't tried yet. I was encouraged to see that in their descriptions of dogs, they encouraged dog park use as a form of exercise for their higher-energy, dog-friendly dogs. But the hound was a "courtesy post" for a collie rescue that had gone south to rescue a collie and had felt obliged to bring an emaciated hound back home with them. I then checked out the collie rescue website which said that it could be up to 10 days after an application had been submitted before someone from their rescue would get in contact. Since I had been waiting months to adopt, an additional 10 days didn't seem that bad, so I filled out the paperwork and pushed the button. Ten days later I got a call.

The woman, a collie fan, was doing the phone interviews for the rescue. She told me that there were multiple applicants for the hound, that she wasn't the one who made the final decision, and that she did not get to know who was the lucky recipient at the end of the process. We had a nice time chatting about dogs. We were hitting it off. I liked her. She was normal. I had a vague feeling that things were going ok. The questions seemed pretty reasonable to me. Then everything came to a screeching halt. The Dog Door of Death entered the room. I could tell at once from the one syllable "Oh" that it was the show-stopper.

"Well," I said, "In my defense, I would like you to know that a LOT of dogs die each year in house fires. I never had to worry about my dog because if the fire alarms ever went off, Ray was the first one out of the house. If you were in his way, you better look out because he would knock you over to get out that dog door."

The woman was interested. She had never thought of it before, but as she stressed to me again, she did not make the final decision. She would pass on the information though. She wished me good luck and rang off.

The last time I looked (today), the hound was still listed on their website. Apparently, I wasn't the only one that didn't measure up enough to adopt the poor emaciated girl dog.