Man's (city dweller's) best friend

One chapter in one of Jennifer Weiner's cute novels has a great opening paragraph about pets, talking about how she thinks everyone who moves to a big city should have to get a dog or a cat. It would just be one of those things: you move, you do the address change, you do the driver's license switch, and you adopt a pet. I thoroughly agree (unless one is really allergic). I don't even know how I lived in NYC for so long without my pup. Seeing him in the snow last weekend made all the cold, all the mess, all the walking through puddles and stumbling over snow drifts worthwhile. Sure I had one day where I got frustrated and cursed the clouds, but when I got the pictures back of him in the snow I felt silly for ever having been upset. I mean, look at that face?!?! And there's nothing like having someone welcome you when you come home; my dad always talks about how having a dog made him feel like a king, like the most important person in the world, because every day, EVERY TIME he returned home, he got the ultimate royal welcome. Sure it's a little neurotic that my dog acts like I've been gone for years when I get home after 5 hours, or that during that time he seemed to consider that I might never return, but what joy! To see that tail way like it's never wagged before, to be covered in kisses, to be unable to stop myself from squealing cooing at him like I haven't seem him in weeks, to have him circling around me like he's trying to keep me from leaving again... it's SO adorable and such a wonderful feeling of mutual adoration.

I highly recommend it. =)