Hi guys.

I suppose all I really have to say is that I love my new job. I work full time, but it feels like no time at all. The weeks have just flown by. Getting dumped by the University was the best thing that could've happened to me. I am seriously damaged by that place, and my boss is always assuring me that they're not going to treat me like they did at Akron. I still live in abject terror though.

The only thing that really happened lately is that Adam and I tried to adopt a dog. Since I'm gone most of the day, our dog is lonely, and gets into trouble. The solution, I thought, was to get her a friend to pal around with. So I applied for this dog I saw on Petfinder. The next step after filling out the 2-hour long application was to have the woman at the adoption agency visit our house. First of all, let me state that this woman was obese. Second, she brought her own little dog with her, but he had to be left in the car for an hour because he was behaving badly. Next this woman starts disciplining our dog based on what she saw on a TV show, The Dog Whisperer. It was a LONG visit where she criticized everything we did with our dog. We didn't feed the dog human-grade food. The dog was fat. The dog was neurotic. We needed to walk the dog two times a day for 45 minutes each time.

The whole time I'm thinking: What the hell does this woman feed herself if she's baking fish and rice for her 11 dogs all day? I don't think she's ever walked for 45 minutes in two weeks, let alone twice a day.

The next day she sent me a LONG email to tell me everything wrong with my dog and that no, we wouldn't be good enough parents for the dog we wanted to adopt. We're unfit to raise a dog. It's a good thing I don't have kids. Children's Services would've had any kids of mine out of the house and into foster care.

Lesson learned. Don't adopt a dog. Just spend $1200 on a dog from a breeder because it's probably easier to get a child from China than to adopt a dog from an agency. In the meantime, I suffer from major guilt from all the abuse I've been doling out to my dog. She now eats human-grade dog food which costs twice as much as the Bil Jac she had been eating. I might start eating it myself. She gets walked once for 45 minutes a day, 'cause if I walked more than that, I'd probably collapse of exhaustion. She goes to doggy day care. She's going to talk to a doggy psychiatrist next week. I don't know what Celes will have to say to her shrink, but I'm sure she has "mommy issues."