Missives from the 6th Floor

Specifically this means:

1. Get the backyard converted from mud to grass. I can't get mad at the dog for tracking in mud if that's all there is to walk on.
2. Figure out where the dogs space will be in the house. The laundry room is the likely candidate, which means we need to figure out where the littler box and shoe rack that occupy that room move to. And, if I'm feeling particularly paranoid, I'll need to find another place to hang my motorcycle kit - 'cause I can only imagine how frustrated I'd be to find chew marks on my (fairly expensive) over-pants.
3. Do a top-down "dog-proofing" of the house - making sure that anything that might attract a dogs attention and that we consider valuable is out of chew/tail-wagging reach.
4. Demonstrate to each other that we can act as if there's a dog in residence - which means not leaving said attractive and valuable things (like shoes, books, etc) in harms way.

Finally, I think it would really make sense to have a fenced area done before bringing the dog home. If we're doing the landscaping, doing a fence at the same time doesn't sound too hard. We talked about where that fence would be, and I imagine it will add something over kilo-buck to the landscaping exercise.

I realized that the lesson to be learned here was from our experience selling our house in CA and buying one up here. We tried to do things out of their "natural" order (buy here before or while selling down there) and it made the whole situation overly fragile. When the CA house fell out of escrow, we had to unwind the pending purchase in WA. In terms of this adventure - setting the foundation in place will give us the best chance of a smooth adoption.

But, in the immortal words, of a certain Spaniard played by Mandy Patinkin:

"I hate waiting."