Okay...where to start. At 23 I find that I'm still quite a child. I get giddy over holidays...well one holiday and that's halloween. I've went so far as to buy my dogs costumes so they could be apart of the fun. Not like they believe it to be any fun... Speaking of dogs I never thought I would have two so soon. It's been a year since I put my big baby down and it still hurts. I remember thinking and saying that I didn't want another animal for a while because I had lost all of my little ones in a span of a year and a half. In May I went to the local animal shelter to prove a point to my boyfriend (that point was he would be able to take care of dog despite his flakey-ness) and we walked out with Indiana (well they called him Bongo but ugh) a 5 month old mutt. He was such a cute wirey little thing with big scared eyes and HUGE ears. No way I was leaving the little booger. He was the exact opposite of Rusty so I could handle having him around and to my surprise it was like having a cat instead of a dog. We noticed that Indy had soo much energy that we couldn't wind him down enough to save our lives. This meant that we should start thinking about getting another dog around his age to play with. We decided that on July 9th we would go to the Humane Society in Charlotte to find him a playmate and had pretty much settle on a 1 & 1/2 year old female pit bull terrier mix that they called Spade. Since Charlotte is about 45 minutes away from our house we called and made sure it would be okay to bring Indy to check her out with us before we fully commited to adopting her. On that day when we got there two Hispanic men were trying to give away an adorable 6 week old puppy. There wee some noticable issues with his health, but it wasn't anything we thought to be serious. They said that the Humane Society wouldn't take him (which I understood because they get their animals from animal control and other shelters) and that they were told to take him to animal control. I knew that a 6 week old puppy had a decent chance of getting adopted but he looked like a pit mix and that would decrease his chances because of the misrepresentation of the Pit Bull Terrier Breed (damn the mass media and dog fighters!!!). With a glance between us, Mike and I decided that we would take him health issues be damned. We went to get him some water from the Humane Society and were treated rather rudely while the poor thing was the focus of some insulting comments (thank goodness he couldn't understand those hateful people). We rushed to get him to a vet before they closed at 12:00 pm (it was Saturday after all) with hopes that my gut feeling was wrong. I absolutely love Lake Norman Animal Hospital because they took us without having an appointment despite the fact that we walked in 2 minutes before they were supposed to close. Maximus (yes he's named after the gladiator) proved my gut feeling correct. He was loaded with hook worms (which feed off of blood) and was deathly anemic. Plus what I thought was mange ended up being ring worm (yay me!). Now we have a wonderful 40 some pound almost 5 month old mutt running into things around the house with my tiny 18.5 lb Indiana trotting along behind him. So yeah life is life and at times surprising. I wonder if anyone would be willing to share stories of animals they adopted?