Saturday morning ritual

Many Saturdays, I wake up to do the same thing. I go to the library to turn in books and check out ones that I've requested. Then I spend the remainder of the morning at the local pet store, which has an adoption day most Saturdays where a no-kill shelter brings in puppies to find homes. I want a dog so badly I can taste it. Now granted, we are broke as a joke...don't have a pot to pee in...can't even pay attention. So I would never go out and purposely buy a dog we truly couldn't afford. However, if a stray just happened upon our property, there's a fairly good chance that I would take it in (any strays out there reading this post? Here's your chance).

Today I was greeted by two dogs. One, a lab/pit mix named Charlie, and the other, some sort of beagle mix, named Dixie. Oh. My. God. Big Boss Man is a lucky son of a gun that I didn't walk into our home with one of those two pups. Adorable, sweet, playful puppies that needed a home because their shelter is closing. Sigh.

Now, I have an old-fashioned dream...I want to move back to the country. I "grew up" on a farm of sorts. An out in the middle of nowhere, fruit tree orchard, chicken coop-having, 4 acre farm. We had no cattle or horses, but we had chickens, about ten million cats and one alaskan husky. We had a workshop, built by my dad and grandfather, on the back of the garage. We had a barn (well, two actually, but one of them got torn down...the memory of pulling that thing down is still fresh-like-yesterday in my mind). We had a treehouse...a two-level treehouse in our backyard. I fell off that treehouse, backwards, when I was young. The memory of that, unfortunately, is also still fresh-like-yesterday to me. I almost get the wind knocked out of me just thinking about it.

Seeing others tell stories of the day-to-day workings of a real life ranch, such as Ree, the Pioneer Woman, makes me long for this life even more. It's so simple. It's refreshing. It's damn hard work. But what a life. So someday...we'll pack our family up and move to Montana or one of the Dakotas or Wyoming. And we'll have our little ranch. And having a dog is just part of making that dream become a reality...after all...every good ranch has to have at least one dog.