Saturday, December 15, 2012

Snoopy

After not blogging for a really long time, I thought it'd be a good idea to revive my blog with documenting the next milestone of our family. Welcome Snoopy Hau! :) 

We've been looking for a dog for a while. I think about a year ago, we started to want a dog but since neither of us have had a dog before, we were a bit nervous and kept flopping back and forth. The last few months we became a bit more serious and started checking out shelters and looking on petfinder.com which is a centralized listing of shelter/rescue dogs. It's actually pretty neat and you can look up dogs by breed and location. Some of the rescue dogs live in host families and they're not at an actual shelter building. In order to meet them, you have to fill out a form telling them everything about yourself and *if* they choose you, they'll contact you and set up a meetup. Some of them even require the organization to come look at your house and make sure it's fit for the dog!!! Can you believe it? Anyways, so we kind of gave up on that method as it was too difficult and seemed like a waste of time. So we just dropped by shelters on weekends to check out the dogs.. and 2 weeks ago.. we went by the San Francisco Animal Care & Control and found this guy!! :D This was one of the first pics we took with him in the meet + greet room. 


We were looking for a small white coloured fluffy dog less than 10lbs. We also like the really calm quiet dogs that just sit there and look cute :) While we were walking around the shelter, the other dogs would bark and jump at us as we walked past, but when we walked up to Snoopy, he just quietly walked up to us and looked at us. It was sooo cute. I asked J.. maybe this is the one?! Do you want to meet him? and we got super excited. Then I got all paranoid that someone else was going to quickly ask for him before we did so we ran out to find a helper. After spending 15 mins with him in the private room, we wanted to take him home. 

The whole transaction was so quick. They need proof that your home allows dogs, so we had to show them our mortgage statements to prove we owned it. The total fee was ~$67 which included dog license, rabies shot, neutering, micro-chipping, some other surgery, and some shot. We were like wowow so cheap? But then the guy told us it's our tax money that pays for the rest -_-". 

Immediately after leaving the SFACC, we took Snoopy to the pet store right after to buy his harness, leash, and basically.. everything. When you adopt from SFACC, they give you a 20% off coupon for Pet Food Express - which makes a huge difference since we have to buy like everything. They also give you a free bag of dog food - which is the same dog food they give to the shelter so the dog can feel comfortable. Pretty cool. 

When visiting shelters, we met alot of cool people that worked/volunteered at the shelter and you can tell they truly cared and had a passion for the animals. At Pet Food Express we experienced the same thing. All the employees were so excited about Snoopy and seemed to genuinely care about helping us in a way that I never experienced in any other retail stores before. These two was our first experiences welcoming us into the "dog" community. :)