You may remember a post from last year about a little dog dying in my arms.
Well, life is about balance. Here is the other side of that coin and how, sometimes, things are just meant to be.
Wife and I have been wanting to adopt for a couple months now. Been looking around, even went to huge adoption festival in the valley. Wanted one dog, but she was placed with her sister (the rescuer didn’t want to separate them).
One of my co-workers suggested Craigslist, and while most were all private, ever since Superchunk, I’m a big believer in rescuing dogs.
So I was going through a few and then I stumbled on this one little dog who was redlisted at the Downey shelter. She was literally ‘about to be euthanized’. It’s an independent rescuer; just a girl who goes down to shelters and takes photographs of the red listed dogs and posts them on Craigslist, and implores people to rescue them.
I took one look at the photo, and went oh my god this is the one. Spent 4 hours online and on the phone hunting her down because it had been a week since the photo was posted. I gotta be honest, the heart was racing; the shelter didn’t recognize her because I had no impound id and they were insisting the one impound id I did have was that of another dog.
About 4 hours of fruitless searching, I was able to get a hold of the original indie craiglist rescuer and, turns out, she actually rescued the dog herself just to get her out of there, and had placed her in a foster home to nurse her back to health. She was skin and bones, and had kennel cough. She believes they had stopped feeding her; this shelter is apparently notorious.
I e-mailed the foster parents (who were working through a rescue place called Love4Canines) and just told them Christina and my story: losing Lulu, love of dogs etc. The whole thing.
They wrote back the next day with kind words and said their were inquiries but really liked us based on my letter. She left her #. So I called, and we spent 45 minutes on the phone. Amazing conversation and essentially a lovefest ever since then. We knew she’d be ours when she wrote back the next day and said, Let me know what name you’ve come up with so I can start getting her used to it!
So, we’re fostering her for 2 weeks while the fostering couple is out of town. The reason is they didn’t want to give her up before being spayed and microchipped. She was microchipped on Saturday, and I picked her up at a Ralphs in Bellflower that afternoon. I hung out with the fostering couple (very nice; a saintly couple of’ OC Punk Rockers; they work at a huge skate and snowboarding company) a bit before taking her home. As soon as I got her, Christina called anxiously, and I told her the (name below) had landed. 2 minutes later I got a text: “I’m leaving work early. As in now” haha
We took her to the vet yesterday. She hasn’t met Superchunk yet because of her kennel cough (highly contagious). So she’s in the bathroom, mostly, and our studio room (supervised, because she’s still not quite housebroken). Every time she has to go to the bathroom, we distract Super and sneak her out. She’s such a sweet and playful dog, he’s going to freak out. Lulu was a bit of a bear, but i think these two will be peas in a pod. And I think he missed having Lulu around, his demeanor has been a little melancholy ever since. That has a lot to do with the fact that he’s losing his hearing and his eyesight. Ugh. Life sucks.
We take her back Memorial Day as I believe she’ll be spayed the following day. Then, we sign the papers and she’s ours!
So, as you can guess her name is “Zoom!” Or Zoomie for long…
And yes, it’s with the exclamation point. 😉
